Chaos numbers based a new representation scheme for evolutionary computation: Applications in evolutionary association rule mining

Abstract In some practical situations, new computational methods are required for appropriately representing systems and their variables with inaccuracies, uncertainties, or variability. The chaos numbers seem to efficiently represent a set or range of values with lower and upper bounds for variables. In this article, a new chaos‐enhanced representation scheme that is based on the notion of chaos numbers is proposed for evolutionary optimization methods. As a first application of chaos‐based new encoding type, it is integrated into the novel hybrid intelligent optimization method proposed that is adapted as numerical association rules miner for the first time. The proposed hybrid method can also be used for complex types of search and optimization problems. The method is designed as a multiobjective rule miner that simultaneously handles different conflicting objectives and finds the accurate and comprehensible rules automatically. Based on the chaotic encoding, the proposed method easily and effectively adjusts the intervals of the attributes and automatically mines the rules without any preprocess. The performance of the proposed method was tested in real quantitative data sets and results were compared with the other association rule mining methods. According to the obtained results, the proposed method seems promising with respect to different metrics.