Probabilistic and reinforced mining of association rules

TL;DR

This paper introduces four novel probabilistic and reinforcement learning methods for association rule mining, enhancing flexibility, uncertainty modeling, and scalability over traditional frequency-based algorithms, with demonstrated effectiveness on various datasets.

Contribution

The work presents four new methods—GPAR, BARM, MAB-ARM, and RLAR—that incorporate probabilistic inference and reinforcement learning into ARM, departing from traditional frequency-based approaches.

Findings

Effective on synthetic and real datasets

Improved discovery of rare and complex patterns

Trade-offs in computational complexity and interpretability

Abstract

This work introduces 4 novel probabilistic and reinforcement-driven methods for association rule mining (ARM): Gaussian process-based association rule mining (GPAR), Bayesian ARM (BARM), multi-armed bandit based ARM (MAB-ARM), and reinforcement learning based association rule mining (RLAR). These methods depart fundamentally from traditional frequency-based algorithms such as Apriori, FP-Growth, and Eclat, offering enhanced capabilities for incorporating prior knowledge, modeling uncertainty, item dependencies, probabilistic inference and adaptive search strategies. GPAR employs Gaussian processes to model item co-occurrence via feature representations, enabling principled inference, uncertainty quantification, and efficient generalization to unseen itemsets without retraining. BARM adopts a Bayesian framework with priors and optional correlation structures, yielding robust uncertainty quantification through full posterior distributions over item presence probabilities. MAB-ARM, including its Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) companion, utilizes an upper confidence bound (UCB) strategy for efficient and adaptive exploration of the itemset space, while RLAR applies a deep Q-network (DQN) to learn a generalizable policy for identifying high-quality rules. Collectively, these approaches improve the flexibility and robustness of ARM, particularly for discovering rare or complex patterns and operating on small datasets. Empirical results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate their effectiveness, while also highlighting trade-offs in computational complexity and interpretability. These innovations mark a significant shift from static, frequency-driven paradigms, offering some prior and dependency-informed, uncertainty-aware or scalable ARM frameworks for diverse application domains such as retail, geography, finance, medical diagnostics, and risk-sensitive scenarios.