We consider the problem of finding two-dimensional association rules for categorical attributes. Suppose we have two conditional
attributes A and B both of whose domains are categorical, and one binary target attribute whose domain is “positive”, “negative”. We want to
split the Cartesian product of domains of A and B into two subsets so that a certain objective function is optimized, i.e., we want to find a good segmentation of the domains
of A and B. We consider in this paper the objective function that maximizes the confidence under the constraint of the upper bound of
the support size. We first prove that the problem is NP-hard, and then propose an approximation algorithm based on semidefinite
programming. In order to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm, we carry out computational experiments
for problem instances generated by real sales data consisting of attributes whose domain size is a few hundreds at maximum.
Approximation ratios of the solutions obtained measured by comparing solutions for semidefinite programming relaxation range
from 76% to 95%. It is observed that the performance of generated association rules are significantly superior to that of
one-dimensional rules.
Research of this paper is partly supported by the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Priority Areas (A) by the Ministry
of Education, Science, Sports and Culture of Japan.