An affordance-based substitution mechanism to mine positive and negative association rules

Abstract

Negative association among products is an upcoming topic of interest in the field of association rule mining. Although researchers have given considerable attention to this idea, we have analyzed some key unaddressed issues in negative association rule discovery and generation. Substitution of items based on their position in the taxonomy is an interesting method to link positive and negative rules. However, we argue that the definition of substitution is not limited to just sibling positions in the taxonomy. Two items can act as substitutes based on the goals and past experiences of the customer. We capture this idea of substitutability using the lens of Affordances to link Product, Purpose and Person notion of Marketing to the generation of negative rules in data mining. This is done by matching the affordances (action possibilities) of products specified by the managers with the customer s goals to form substitutable sets of items corresponding to each goal. These sets of substitutable items are then used to form substitution rules. The deviation from the expected confidence of generating these substitute rules, result in formation of interesting negative rules.