THAPE: A Tunable Hybrid Associative Predictive Engine Approach for Enhancing Rule Interpretability in Association Rule Learning for the Retail Sector

Association rule learning(ARL)is a widely used technique for discovering relationships within datasets.However,it often generates excessive irrelevant or ambiguous rules.Therefore,post-processing is crucial not only for removing irrelevant or redundant rules but also for uncovering hidden associations that impact other factors.Recently,several post-processing methods have been proposed,each with its own strengths and weaknesses.In this paper,we propose THAPE(Tunable Hybrid Associative Predictive Engine),which combines descriptive and predictive techniques.By leveraging both techniques,our aim is to enhance the quality of analyzing generated rules.This includes removing irrelevant or redundant rules,uncovering interesting and useful rules,exploring hidden association rules that may affect other factors,and providing backtracking ability for a given product.The proposed approach offers a tailored method that suits specific goals for retailers,enabling them to gain a better understanding of customer behavior based on factual transactions in the target market.We applied THAPE to a real dataset as a case study in this paper to demonstrate its effectiveness.Through this application,we successfully mined a concise set of highly interesting and useful association rules.Out of the 11,265 rules generated,we identified 125 rules that are particularly relevant to the business context.These identified rules significantly improve the interpretability and usefulness of association rules for decision-making purposes.

Safety Assessment of Liquid Launch Vehicle Structures Based on Interpretable Belief Rule Base

A liquid launch vehicle is an important carrier in aviation,and its regular operation is essential to maintain space security.In the safety assessment of fluid launch vehicle body structure,it is necessary to ensure that the assessmentmodel can learn self-response rules from various uncertain data and not differently to provide a traceable and interpretable assessment process.Therefore,a belief rule base with interpretability(BRB-i)assessment method of liquid launch vehicle structure safety status combines data and knowledge.Moreover,an innovative whale optimization algorithm with interpretable constraints is proposed.The experiments are carried out based on the liquid launch vehicle safety experiment platform,and the information on the safety status of the liquid launch vehicle is obtained by monitoring the detection indicators under the simulation platform.The MSEs of the proposed model are 3.8000e-03,1.3000e-03,2.1000e-03,and 1.8936e-04 for 25%,45%,65%,and 84%of the training samples,respectively.It can be seen that the proposed model also shows a better ability to handle small sample data.Meanwhile,the belief distribution of the BRB-i model output has a high fitting trend with the belief distribution of the expert knowledge settings,which indicates the interpretability of the BRB-i model.Experimental results show that,compared with other methods,the BRB-i model guarantees the model’s interpretability and the high precision of experimental results.