RuleMiner.jl
RuleMiner is a Julia package for association rule and frequent itemset mining inspired by the arules R package and SPMF Java library.
About Association Rule Mining
Association rule and frequent itemset mining are techniques dedicated to efficiently searching for and quantifying the concurrence of variables within observations (transactions) of data. They are most commonly used in retail applications like market-basket analysis, but they are also employed in other domains like web traffic analysis and bioinformatics.
Design Goals
The goal in designing this package was to build a tool for mining frequent itemsets in Julia that was easy to use and extremely fast at extracting the relevant patterns from the transactions dataset.
One major headache with mining tools in other languages is their unfriendly output formats that either use custom data structures or print directly into files. Thus, RuleMiner was designed to output directly into a DataFrames.jl DataFrame for better slicing, sorting and general portability.
The other key design goal was speed. All the algorithms are multi-threaded and optimized to mine the rules as fast as possible. The multi-threaded implementation of this package allows it to outperform the single-threaded C modules that underpin tools like the arules package in R. File reading has also been optimized to massively reduce the I/O time for reading transactional data files compared to implementations in Python and R.
Current Status
RuleMiner currently supports two algorithms: A Priori and ECLAT, with more algorithms planned for future releases. If you’d like to help me build out this package or report an issue, you can find the Github repository here.
If you have any suggestions or comments, I’d love to hear them!