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arules

Mining Association Rules and Frequent Itemsets with R

R package arules - Mining Association Rules and Frequent Itemsets

r-universe status Package on CRAN CRAN RStudio mirror downloads Anaconda.org StackOverflow

Introduction

The arules package family for R provides the infrastructure for representing, manipulating and analyzing transaction data and patterns using frequent itemsets and association rules. The package also provides a wide range of interest measures and mining algorithms including the code of Christian Borgelt’s popular and efficient C implementations of the association mining algorithms Apriori and Eclat. In addition, the following mining algorithms are available via fim4r:

Code examples can be found in Chapter 5 of the web book R Companion for Introduction to Data Mining.

To cite package ‘arules’ in publications use:

Hahsler M, Gruen B, Hornik K (2005). “arules - A Computational Environment for Mining Association Rules and Frequent Item Sets.” Journal of Statistical Software, 14(15), 1-25. ISSN 1548-7660, <doi:10.18637/jss.v014.i15> https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v014.i15.

@Article{,
  title = {arules -- {A} Computational Environment for Mining Association Rules and Frequent Item Sets},
  author = {Michael Hahsler and Bettina Gruen and Kurt Hornik},
  year = {2005},
  journal = {Journal of Statistical Software},
  volume = {14},
  number = {15},
  pages = {1--25},
  doi = {10.18637/jss.v014.i15},
  month = {October},
  issn = {1548-7660},
}

Packages

arules core packages

Additional mining algorithms

In-database analytics

Interface

Classification

Outlier Detection

Recommendation/Prediction

The following R packages use arules: aPEAR, arc, arulesCBA, arulesNBMiner, arulesSequences, arulesViz, clickstream, CLONETv2, CRE, ctsem, discnorm, fcaR, fdm2id, GroupBN, ibmdbR, immcp, inTrees, opusminer, pmml, qCBA, RareComb, rattle, rCBA, recommenderlab, rgnoisefilt, RKEEL, sbrl, SurvivalTests, TELP

Installation

Stable CRAN version: Install from within R with

install.packages("arules")

Current development version: Install from r-universe.

install.packages("arules",
    repos = c("https://mhahsler.r-universe.dev",
              "https://cloud.r-project.org/"))

Usage

Load package and mine some association rules.

library("arules")
data("IncomeESL")

trans <- transactions(IncomeESL)
trans

## transactions in sparse format with
##  8993 transactions (rows) and
##  84 items (columns)

rules <- apriori(trans, supp = 0.1, conf = 0.9, target = "rules")

## Apriori
## 
## Parameter specification:
##  confidence minval smax arem  aval originalSupport maxtime support minlen
##         0.9    0.1    1 none FALSE            TRUE       5     0.1      1
##  maxlen target  ext
##      10  rules TRUE
## 
## Algorithmic control:
##  filter tree heap memopt load sort verbose
##     0.1 TRUE TRUE  FALSE TRUE    2    TRUE
## 
## Absolute minimum support count: 899 
## 
## set item appearances ...[0 item(s)] done [0.00s].
## set transactions ...[84 item(s), 8993 transaction(s)] done [0.01s].
## sorting and recoding items ... [42 item(s)] done [0.00s].
## creating transaction tree ... done [0.00s].
## checking subsets of size 1 2 3 4 5 6 done [0.02s].
## writing ... [457 rule(s)] done [0.00s].
## creating S4 object  ... done [0.00s].

Inspect the rules with the highest lift.

inspect(head(rules, n = 3, by = "lift"))

##     lhs                           rhs                      support confidence coverage lift count
## [1] {dual incomes=no,                                                                            
##      householder status=own}   => {marital status=married}    0.10       0.97     0.10  2.6   914
## [2] {years in bay area=>10,                                                                      
##      dual incomes=yes,                                                                           
##      type of home=house}       => {marital status=married}    0.10       0.96     0.10  2.6   902
## [3] {dual incomes=yes,                                                                           
##      householder status=own,                                                                     
##      type of home=house,                                                                         
##      language in home=english} => {marital status=married}    0.11       0.96     0.11  2.6   988

Using arules with tidyverse

arules works seamlessly with tidyverse. For example:

For example, we can remove the ethnic information column before creating transactions and then mine and inspect rules.

library("tidyverse")
library("arules")
data("IncomeESL")

trans <- IncomeESL |>
    select(-`ethnic classification`) |>
    transactions()
rules <- trans |>
    apriori(supp = 0.1, conf = 0.9, target = "rules", control = list(verbose = FALSE))
rules |>
    head(3, by = "lift") |>
    as("data.frame") |>
    tibble()

## # A tibble: 3 × 6
##   rules                                  support confidence coverage  lift count
##   <chr>                                    <dbl>      <dbl>    <dbl> <dbl> <int>
## 1 {dual incomes=no,householder status=o…   0.102      0.971    0.105  2.62   914
## 2 {years in bay area=>10,dual incomes=y…   0.100      0.961    0.104  2.59   902
## 3 {dual incomes=yes,householder status=…   0.110      0.960    0.114  2.59   988

Using arules from Python

arules and arulesViz can now be used directly from Python with the Python package arulespy available form PyPI.

Support

Please report bugs here on GitHub. Questions should be posted on stackoverflow and tagged with arules.

References