Association rules are a popular data mining method in business, especially where selling is involved. Also known as market basket analysis, it helps in answering questions about cross-selling opportunities. This is the heart of the personalization engine used by ecommerce sites like Amazon.com and streaming movie sites like Netflix.com. The technique helps find interesting relationships (affinities) between variables (items or events). These are represented as rules of the form X ® Y, where X and Y are sets of data items. A form of unsupervised learning, it has no dependent variable; and
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