Database Reference
In-Depth Information
the organizations in town, has contact information for them and is even involved in some of them
himself. His family is involved in an even broader group of organizations, so he understands on a
personal level the diversity of groups and their interests. Because people he and his family knows
are involved in other groups around town, he is aware in a more general sense of many different
types of organizations, their interests, objectives and potential contributions. He knows that to
start, his main concern is finding types of organizations that seem to be connected with one
another. Identifying individuals to work with at each church, social club or political organization
will be overwhelming without first categorizing the organizations into groups and looking for
associations between the groups. Only once he's checked for existing connections will he feel
ready to begin contacting people and asking them to use their cross-organizational contacts and
take on project ownership. His first need is to find where such associations exist.
DATA UNDERSTANDING
In order to answer his question, Roger has enlisted our help in creating an
association rules
data
mining model. Association rules are a data mining methodology that seeks to find frequent
connections between attributes in a data set. Association rules are very common when doing
shopping basket analysis. Marketers and vendors in many sectors use this data mining approach to
try to find which products are most frequently purchased together. If you have ever purchased
items on an e-Commerce retail site like Amazon.com, you have probably seen the fruits of
association rule data mining. These are most commonly found in the recommendations sections
of such web sites. You might notice that when you search for a smartphone, recommendations for
screen protectors, protective cases, and other accessories such as charging cords or data cables are
often recommended to you. The items being recommended are identified by mining for items that
previous customers bought in conjunction with the item you search for. In other words, those
items are found to be
associated
with the item you are looking for, and that association is so frequent
in the web site's data set, that the
association
might be considered a
rule
. Thus is born the name of
this data mining approach: “association rules”. While association rules are most common in
shopping basket analysis, this modeling technique can be applied to a broad range of questions.
We will help Roger by creating an association rule model to try to find linkages across types of
community organizations.
