arules (version 1.6-8)

random.transactions: Simulate a Random Transaction Data Set

Description

Simulates a random '>transactions object using different methods.

Usage

random.transactions(nItems, nTrans, method = "independent", …,
	verbose = FALSE)

Arguments

nItems

an integer. Number of items.

nTrans

an integer. Number of transactions.

method

name of the simulation method used (default: all items occur independently).

…

further arguments used for the specific simulation method (see details).

verbose

report progress.

Value

Returns an object of class '>transactions.

Details

The function generates a nitems times ntrans transaction database.

Currently two simulation methods are implemented:

method "independent" (see Hahsler et al., 2006)

All items are treated as independent. The transaction size is determined by \(rpois(lambda-1)+1\), where lambda can be specified (defaults to 3). Note that one subtracted from lambda and added to the size to avoid empty transactions. The items in the transactions are randomly chosen using the numeric probability vector iProb of length nItems (default: 0.01 for each item).

method "agrawal" (see Agrawal and Srikant, 1994)

This method creates transactions with correlated items uses the following additional parameters:

lTrans

average length of transactions.

nPats

number of patterns (potential maximal frequent itemsets) used.

lPats

average length of patterns.

corr

correlation between consecutive patterns.

cmean

mean of the corruption level (normal distr.).

cvar

variance of the corruption level.

The simulation is a two-stage process. First, a set of nPats patterns (potential maximal frequent itemsets) is generated. The length of the patterns is Poisson distributed with mean lPats and consecutive patterns share some items controlled by the correlation parameter corr. For later use, for each pattern a pattern weight is generated by drawing from an exponential distribution with a mean of 1 and a corruption level is chosen from a normal distribution with mean cmean and variance cvar.

The patterns are created using the following function:

random.patterns(nItems, nPats = 2000, method = "agrawal", lPats = 4, corr = 0.5, cmean = 0.5, cvar = 0.1, iWeight = NULL, verbose = FALSE)

The function returns the patterns as an itemsets objects which can be supplied to random.transactions as the argument patterns. If no argument patterns is supplied, the default values given above are used.

In the second step, the transactions are generated using the patterns. The length the transactions follows a Poisson distribution with mean lPats. For each transaction, patterns are randomly chosen using the pattern weights till the transaction length is reached. For each chosen pattern, the associated corruption level is used to drop some items before adding the pattern to the transaction.

References

Michael Hahsler, Kurt Hornik, and Thomas Reutterer (2006). Implications of probabilistic data modeling for mining association rules. In M. Spiliopoulou, R. Kruse, C. Borgelt, A. Nuernberger, and W. Gaul, editors, From Data and Information Analysis to Knowledge Engineering, Studies in Classification, Data Analysis, and Knowledge Organization, pages 598--605. Springer-Verlag.

Rakesh Agrawal and Ramakrishnan Srikant (1994). Fast algorithms for mining association rules in large databases. In Jorge B. Bocca, Matthias Jarke, and Carlo Zaniolo, editors, Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, VLDB, pages 487--499, Santiago, Chile.

See Also

transactions-class.

Examples

# NOT RUN {
## generate random 1000 transactions for 200 items with 
## a success probability decreasing from 0.2 to 0.0001
## using the method described in Hahsler et al. (2006).
trans <- random.transactions(nItems = 200, nTrans = 1000, 
   lambda = 5, iProb = seq(0.2,0.0001, length=200))

## size distribution
summary(size(trans))

## display random data set
image(trans)

## use the method by Agrawal and Srikant (1994) to simulate transactions 
## which contains correlated items. This should create data similar to
## T10I4D100K (we just create 100 transactions here to speed things up).
patterns <- random.patterns(nItems = 1000)
summary(patterns)

trans2 <- random.transactions(nItems = 1000, nTrans = 100, 
   method = "agrawal", patterns = patterns)
image(trans2) 

## plot data with items ordered by item frequency
image(trans2[,order(itemFrequency(trans2), decreasing=TRUE)])
# }