Exceptional Association Rule Set Discovery from Community-Dwelling Elderly People Database

An extended method to discover exceptional association rule sets from incomplete databases is proposed. In an exceptional rule set, each itemset X, Y has a weak or no statistical relation to class C; however, the join of X and Y has a strong relation to C. An exceptional rule set can be used to infer long rules for the join of X and Y and to discover rare rules. The proposed method calculates the rule evaluation odds ratio directly. In this study, the method is applied to rule discovery using a database of community-dwelling elderly. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can help discover interesting rare rules and exceptional association rule sets. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed method in the fields of medicine and health care.