Simple and effective behavior tracking by post processing of association rules into segments

Frequent pattern mining and consequently association rule mining is a useful technique for discovering relationships between items in databases. However, as the size of the data to be analyzed increases or the values of the pruning thresholds decrease, larger number of frequent pattern and more association rules will be generated with little information about the association rules in relation to each other. This research paper discusses a method to segment rules into different sets with no internal conflicts. The goal is to establish an effective method to reduce the difficulty for businesses to review the association rules of different customer segments, and track the behaviors of market segments based on their buying behaviors. The method established in this paper has the advantage of not needing customer information, thus removing the need for businesses to obtain customer information. This removes the threat of intrusions into customer privacy. The method also generates the rule sets based on conflicting rules, and dividing rules based on customer behaviors is more accurate than customer characteristics. The proposed method has been validated by running some tests.