Association Analysis
Vijay Kotu, Bala Deshpande · Data Science · 2019
In the retail industry, market basket analysis explores the relationship between products by considering the co-occurrence of purchases in previous transactions. Association analysis is a generalization of applications, like market basket analysis, and is now commonly applied in clickstream analysis, cross-selling recommendation engines, and information security. Association analysis is an unsupervised data science technique where there is no target variable to predict. Instead, the algorithm reviews each transaction containing a number of items (products) and extracts useful relationship patterns among the items in the form of rules. The challenge in association analysis is to differentiate a significant observation against unscrupulous rules. The Apriori and Frequent Pattern Growth algorithms offer efficient approaches to extract these rules from large datasets in the transaction logs.