  Association rule mining is an important problem in the data mining area. It
enumerates and tests a large number of rules on a dataset and outputs rules
that satisfy user-specified constraints. Due to the large number of rules being
tested, rules that do not represent real systematic effect in the data can
satisfy the given constraints purely by random chance. Hence association rule
mining often suffers from a high risk of false positive errors. There is a lack
of comprehensive study on controlling false positives in association rule
mining. In this paper, we adopt three multiple testing correction
approaches---the direct adjustment approach, the permutation-based approach and
the holdout approach---to control false positives in association rule mining,
and conduct extensive experiments to study their performance. Our results show
that (1) Numerous spurious rules are generated if no correction is made. (2)
The three approaches can control false positives effectively. Among the three
approaches, the permutation-based approach has the highest power of detecting
real association rules, but it is very computationally expensive. We employ
several techniques to reduce its cost effectively.
