Association against Dissociation: some pragmatic considerations for Frequent Itemset generation under Fixed and Variable Thresholds Sukomal Pal and Aditya Bagchi   View Paper (PDF)   Return to December 2005, Volume 7, Issue 2 Abstract Traditionally, support is considered to be the standard measure for frequent itemset generation in Association Rule mining. This paper provides a new measure called togetherness where dissociation among items is also considered as a parameter in the frequent itemset generation process. Results of performance analysis show that association against dissociation is a more pragmatic approach and discovers truly associated candidate itemsets. Second part of the paper extends this togetherness measure to the domain of variable threshold. Here, like variable minimum support, a variable minimum togetherness has been proposed where this minimum value decreases as the itemset size increases. A simple and pragmatic process has been described, which can be easily implemented. It also provides ample control facilities in the hand of the users. Necessary change and extension of the existing algorithms have been made to establish the concepts. Here as well, results of performance analysis justify the approach. ©2006 Association for Computing Machinery