Association Rules: discretization

Hi there,

it has been a long i'm trying to execute Microsoft Association Rules on my database.

I solved memory leak problem now, but i still can't understand output rules.

Database contain all the italian student who took a degree last year. Here in Italy, they have to compile a summary where they speak about universitary experience. ie: they talk about experience with teachers (pointage from 1 to 5); they says if they want to continue in the universitary field or not, and so on.

Most of the rules, says:

Int_Stud=1-2, RapDoc>4

Int_Stud is the column where i store student intention to continue university. 1 means they want to go on, 2 means they do not want to continue to study. So, this rules has no sense, because it relates all the student (in my mind): the one who wants to continue university and the one who do not want to.

I think problem is that visual studio 2005 and analysis service has no understanding of Int_Stud world, they've no idea that Int_Stud can have just 2 values and that they're opposite each other. Is there a solution to this problem? Can i discretize this column?

Even if I know not to have perfect english, I hope to be understandable

I think you have to modify your data source in sense of replacing 1 with "Continue" and 2 with "NotContinue" or something like that. I think the system consider 1 and 2 as a number. This replacing conduct to understandability too.|||

do u mean i have to modify value in database? I mean, i've something similar to 90 column in the same situation of Int_Stud ... does exist another solution? Moreover, most of fact table - i worked on - had only numeric values in (no text) ...|||

In this discretized situations I think u have to make necessary transformations. Let's think you have to present this project to your big boss. You have to explain in a legend what you mean with Int_stud that have value 1 or 2 etc. I don't have to be in your position ...

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ggciubuc wrote:

In this discretized situations I think u have to make necessary transformations. Let's think you have to present this project to your big boss. You have to explain in a legend what you mean with Int_stud that have value 1 or 2 etc. I don't have to be in your position ...

I continue not understand what you mean when you speak about transformations .. why can't i make a discretization procedure on my numeric value? Can't i divided them into bucket?

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think you have to modify your data source in sense of replacing 1 with "Continue" and 2 with "NotContinue" or something like that.

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ggciubuc wrote:

think you have to modify your data source in sense of replacing 1 with "Continue" and 2 with "NotContinue" or something like that.

so, you mean that i've to modify my source data by changing numeric value with text one? Why? This will be text analysis, won't it?

I used weka one time, and it has a tool which allows to discretize numeric value by dividing it into bin (and you can set your preference too)

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You don't have to replace int values with text to make association rules model work correctly. All you need to do is change the column from Discretized to Discrete. (Open Mining Structure tab and look at the Content property of the column)

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My ideea is to make things more readable and understandable. I should do in this way.

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Tatyana Yakushev wrote:

You don't have to replace int values with text to make association rules model work correctly. All you need to do is change the column from Discretized to Discrete. (Open Mining Structure tab and look at the Content property of the column)

thanks so much .. it works exactly as i wanted to