Finding Suitable Membership Functions for Mining Fuzzy Association Rules in Web Data Using Learning Automata

Abstract

Transactions in web data are huge amounts of data, often consisting of fuzzy and quantitative values. Mining fuzzy association rules can help discover interesting relationships between web data. The quality of these rules depends on membership functions, and thus, it is essential to find the suitable number and position of membership functions. The time spent by users on each web page, which shows their level of interest in those web pages, can be considered as a trapezoidal membership function (TMF). In this paper, the optimization problem was finding the appropriate number and position of TMFs for each web page. To solve this optimization problem, a learning automata-based algorithm was proposed to optimize the number and position of TMFs (LA-ONPTMF). Experiments conducted on two real datasets confirmed that the proposed algorithm enhances the efficiency of mining fuzzy association rules by extracting the optimized TMFs.