A new way to evaluate association rule mining methods and its
applicability to mineral association analysis
Abstract
There has been a significant increase in the amount and accuracy of
mineral data (from resources like Mindat, MED or the GEMI) and the
improvements in technological resources make it possible to explore and
answer large, outstanding scientific questions, such as, understanding
the mineral assemblages on Earth and how they compare to assemblages and
localities on other planets. In the last couple of years, affinity
analysis methods have been used to:1) Predict unreported minerals at an
existing locality, 2) Predict localities for a set of known
minerals[1]. We’ve chosen to call this application “Mineral
Association Analysis”[2]. Affinity analysis is an unsupervised
machine learning method that uses mined association rules to find
interesting patterns in the data. Most of the metrics used to evaluate
market basket analysis methods focus on either the ability of the model
to ingest large amounts of data[3], or using a metric based
comparison of various algorithms used for association rule
mining[4], or on evaluating the rules mined to more efficiently
generate association rules[5]. However, when patterns generated in
an unsupervised method are used to predict the occurrences of entities
such as minerals, there needs to be a way to evaluate the predictions
made by the model. It’s in such an area that there has been very little
work. In this abstract, we explore the development of a new method to
evaluate the results of association rule mining algorithms specifically
when used when the association rules generated are utilized in a
predictive setting. [1] Prabhu et. al (2019). In AGU Fall Meeting
Abstracts (EP23D-2286). [2] Morrison et al. Nat. Geo. (2021) In
Prep. [3] Agrawal et al. (1993) SIGMOD’93. [4] Sharma et al.
(2012) IJERT 1(06). [5] Üstündağ and Bal (2014) Proc. in Comp.