Mining Predicate Association Rule by Gene Expression Programming

Gene expression programming (GEP) is a new technique in genetic computing introduced in 2001. Association rule mining is a typical task in data mining. In this article, a new concept called Predicate Association (PA) is introduced and a new method to discover PA by GEP, called PAGEP (mining Predicate Association by GEP), is proposed. Main results are: (1) The inherent weaknesses of traditional association (TA) are explored. It is proved that TA is a special case of PA. (2) The algorithms for mining PAR, decoding chromosome and fitness are proposed and implemented. (3) It is also proved that gene decoding procedure always success for any well-defined gene. (4) Extensive experiments are given to demonstrate that PAGEP can discover some association rule that cannot be expressed and discovered by traditional method.