Business Case Analysis Association

Data Mining
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Student Id and Name

Business Case Analysis
1. Association rule
Cosmetic small.xls data has been taken into consideration to perform association rule. For this
operation, XLMiner Analytical Tool has been used.
The XLMiner default setting such as minimum confidence (%) of 50 has been taken into account
and the output is highlighted below.
(i) First three rules based on the output are discussed as highlighted below (Zaki, 2000).
Association Rule 1
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The first row id (1) represents confidence percentage of 100%. This means that it can be cited
with 100% confidence that one who would purchase brush would also make a purchase of nail
polish.
Association Rule 2
The second row id (2) represents confidence percentage of 63.218%. This means that it can be
cited with 63.218% confidence that one who would purchase nail polish would also make a
purchase of brush.
Association Rule 3
The third row id (3) represents confidence percentage of 59.195%. This means that it can be
cited with 59.195% confidence that one who would purchase nail polish would also make a
purchase of bronzer (Rouse, 2004).
(i) The redundancy of rule refers to a situation where the support expressed by particular
rule is on predictable lines as that predicted by a rule acting as the ancestor. An apt
example of this exists in the form of second rule which is redundant when compared with
rule one. This is because the support levels for the two are exactly the same. Similarly,
redundancy is also observed for in case of rule 16 and rule 17 where the latter is the
redundant rule.
The utility of the rules derived is based on the underlying support and confidence parameters
associated with a rule. Support acts as a reflection of significance while confidence level
provides a reflection of the conditional probability of events. Combining both, useful information
can be derived (Zaki, 2000).
(ii) The impacts when the confidence percentage input in XLMiner has been altered from
50% to 75%. Need to be discussed
The new XLMiner output (with confidence percentage as 75%) is shown below:
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Impact
 List of rules has been reduced from 9 to 1 because of the increase in the confidence
percentage.
 Only one rule appears with confidence % of 100 on which the person who used to purchase
brushes would also purchase nail polish.
Reason
XLMiner has eliminated the number of rules which indicates the confidence percentage lower
than the input minimum confidence percentage. This is because XLMiner will only display the
association rules which represent higher percentage of confidence as compared with the input
minimum confidence percentage (Rouse, 2004).
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