THAPE: A Tunable Hybrid Associative Predictive Engine Approach for Enhancing Rule Interpretability in Association Rule Learning for the Retail Sector

Association rule learning (ARL) is a widely used technique for discovering relationships within datasets. However, it often generates excessive irrelevant or ambiguous rules. Therefore, post-processing is crucial not only for removing irrelevant or redundant rules but also for uncovering hidden associations that impact other factors. Recently, several post-processing methods have been proposed, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. In this paper, we propose THAPE (Tunable Hybrid Associative Predictive Engine), which combines descriptive and predictive techniques. By leveraging both techniques, our aim is to enhance the quality of analyzing generated rules. This includes removing irrelevant or redundant rules, uncovering interesting and useful rules, exploring hidden association rules that may affect other factors, and providing backtracking ability for a given product. The proposed approach offers a tailored method that suits specific goals for retailers, enabling them to gain a better understanding of customer behavior based on factual transactions in the target market. We applied THAPE to a real dataset as a case study in this paper to demonstrate its effectiveness. Through this application, we successfully mined a concise set of highly interesting and useful association rules. Out of the 11,265 rules generated, we identified 125 rules that are particularly relevant to the business context. These identified rules significantly improve the interpretability and usefulness of association rules for decision-making purposes.