What Is The Difference Between (CARMA) and Apriori?

You might have heard of the Apriori algorithm, which is mostly used for generating association rules. CARMA, which stands for Continuous Association Rule Mining Algorithm, is another algorithm which can be used for association rule mining (ARM).

In this post, I would be talking mainly about the difference between CARMA and Apriori algorithms and the suitability of using different ARM algorithms for a given problem.

What Is CARMA?

CARMA consists of 2 phases or passes of data which can be summarised as follows:

Phase I: CARMA uses a single pass to construct a list of itemsets (lattice) of all potentially frequent itemsets for every transaction. For each transaction being processed, the user can specify any support threshold. As each transaction is read, the itemset is updated.

Phase II: The second phase determines the precise support of all itemsets and prunes away all infrequent itemsets, and their supersets reduce the time needed and make processing more efficient. Lastly, only frequent association rules are being generated from the updated lattice.

Compared to the Apriori algorithm, CARMA can generate rules with multiple consequents (e.g. Antecedent = {Milk, Bread} and Consequent = {Eggs, Ham}, whereas the former can…