Association Rules node

Association rules are statements of the following form.


if  condition(s)  then  prediction(s)

For example, "If a customer purchases a razor and after shave, then that customer will purchase shaving cream with 80% confidence." The Association Rules node extracts a set of rules from the data, pulling out the rules with the highest information content. The Association Rules node is very similar to the Apriori node, however, there are some notable differences:

  • The Association Rules node cannot process transactional data.
  • The Association Rules node can process data that has the List storage type and the Collection measurement level.
  • The Association Rules node can be used with IBM® SPSS® Analytic Server. This provides scalability and means that you can process big data and take advantage of faster parallel processing.
  • The Association Rules node provides additional settings, such as the ability to restrict the number of rules that are generated, thereby increasing the processing speed.
  • Output from the model nugget is shown in the Output Viewer.
Note: The Association Rules node does not support the Model Evaluation or Champion Challenger steps in IBM SPSS Collaboration and Deployment Services.
Note: The Association Rules node ignores empty records when building a model if the field type is a flag. Empty records are records where all the fields used in the model build have a false value.

A stream that shows a working example of using Association Rules, named geospatial_association.str, and which references the data files InsuranceData.sav, CountyData.sav, and ChicagoAreaCounties.shpis available from the Demos directory of your IBM SPSS Modeler installation. You can access the Demos directory from the IBM SPSS Modeler program group on the Windows Start menu. The geospatial_association.str file is in the streams directory.