Association Rules and Statistics

A manager would like to have a dashboard of his company without manipulating data. Usually, statistics have solved this challenge, but nowadays, data have changed (Jensen, 1992); their size has increased, and they are badly structured (Han & Kamber, 2001). A recent method—data mining—has been developed to analyze this type of data (Piatetski-Shapiro, 2000). A specific method of data mining, which fits the goal of the manager, is the extraction of association rules (Hand, Mannila & Smyth, 2001). This extraction is a part of attribute-oriented induction (Guyon & Elisseeff, 2003). The aim of this paper is to compare both types of extracted knowledge: association rules and results of statistics.