Algorithms for association rule mining — a general survey and comparison

Today there are several efficient algorithms that cope with the popular and computationally expensive task of association rule mining. Actually, these algorithms are more or less described on their own. In this paper we explain the fundamentals of association rule mining and moreover derive a general framework. Based on this we describe today's approaches in context by pointing out common aspects and differences. After that we thoroughly investigate their strengths and weaknesses and carry out several runtime experiments. It turns out that the runtime behavior of the algorithms is much more similar as to be expected.