NEWS

arules 1.7.16

Documentation and Maintenance

Added missing aliases for plot.associations() and plot.itemMatrix().
Including a new tidyverse vignette.

arules 1.7.15 (2026-09-11)

New Features

Added interest measures: Netconf and Zhang’s Measure
Added classification measures for rules: accuracy, precision, recall, F-score, and balanced accuracy.

Bug Fixes

predict(): Fixed block-size handling and block boundaries. Blocked prediction now processes each observation exactly once and correctly handles a single-row newdata object.
aggregate(): Fixed aggregation of itemsets, which previously discarded the aggregated object.
Fixed the error message produced in non-interactive sessions when a suggested package is not installed.
ruleInduction() now warns about unknown arguments.
Corrected the formulas for collective strength, causal support and confidence, least contradiction, and substitute hyper-confidence.
The misspelled interest-measure names casualSupport and casualConfidence are deprecated. Use causalSupport and causalConfidence instead.
fixed count smoothing for interest measure computation.
fixed the bootstrap se attribute.

Documentation and Maintenance

Added tests for aggregate(), predict(), PMML round trips, and supportingTransactions().
Switched the test suite explicitly to testthat edition 3.
Fixed the random seed initialization in the package vignette.
Fixed TYPOs.
Improved parameter descriptions and general documentation.
Added five short task-oriented R Markdown vignettes.

arules 1.7.14 (2026-03-29)

Added PROTECT to all getAttr calls in src.
Removed deprecated src sparse matrix functions.

arules 1.7.13 (2026-01-10)

Fixed link to arulesCBA in README
Fixed mailto in vignette.

arules 1.7.12

Changes

Fixed partial argument matches.

arules 1.7-11 (2025-05-29)

Changes

dissimilarity(): The parameter which is now replaced with the logical items.
dissimilarity(): Added cross-dissimilarity calculation for Euclidean distances. Dissimilarities are now computed on the sparse itemMatrix objects and tests were added.
We use now the built-in R_chk_memcpy and R_chk_memset.

arules 1.7-10 (2025-04-22)

Changes

Improved documentation for apriori and eclat. Make clear that a logical matrix is needed.

Bug Fix

R 4.5.0 changes the pointers for 0-length objects which is problematic with older implementations of memcpy and some sanitizers. I added the solution used in r-lib/rlang provided by aitap (https://github.com/r-lib/rlang/pull/1797). The bug was originally reported by MichaelChirico.

arules 1.7-9 (2024-12-14)

Internal Changes

C code: Legacy variable length arrays in structs use now C99 syntax so that UBSAN's static analysis does not report a non-existing out-of-bounds violation.

arules 1.7-8 (2024-08-22)

Changes

Updated tests for testthat edition 3.

Internal Changes

Disable internal ngCMatrix subsetting code which has issues with R-devel. We use now subsetting provided by package Matrix which is almost as fast.
Disable internal code for rowSums and colSums for ngCMatrix.
Internal code for t for ngCMatrix is now only used internally.
The custom code and the exported symbols are now deprecated and will be removed in the next major release.

Bugfixes

Fixed 'Error in .basicRuleMeasure(..) unused argument (complement = TRUE)' reported by bachnguyen-tomo.
Added package anchors in man pages for ngCMatrix-class.

arules 1.7-7 (2023-11-29)

Changes

is.significant gained parameter reuse. The default for adjust was changed to "none."
improved some error messages.
Added Wikipedia links to measures.md.
Added interest measure LIC.

Bugfixes

Fixed appearance code for fim4r (reported by mytarmail).

arules 1.7-6 (2023-03-23)

Changes

Improved the interface for fim4r. support and confidence now uses [0, 1]; added verbose and originalSupport.

Bugfixes

eclat and apriori now use the next smaller representable double for minsupp to make sure that >= minsupp works.

arules 1.7-5 (2022-10-21)

Bugfixes

discretize(): dig.lab is now correctly passed on to cut() (reported by LectronPusher).
Fixed C prototype warnings

arules 1.7-4 (2022-08-16)

Changes

We install now the latest version of fim4r
Changes in coercion for Matrix 1.4-2

Bugfixes

eclat() now correctly returns frequent itemsets when all have exactly minsupport (reported by GauthierMagnin).

arules 1.7-3 (2022-01-09)

Changes

Manual pages are now created using roxygen2.
support() uses now explicit arguments instead of control.
ruleInduction() uses now explicit arguments instead of control.

New Feature

Added interface to fim4r algorithms.

arules 1.7-2 (2021-12-10)

New Feature

The C APRIORI implementation can now mine frequent generator itemsets (contributed by Makh2018).

Bugfixes

deparse1() needs R 4.0.0

arules 1.7-1 (2021-11-19)

Bugfixes

Fixed some C issues: unsigned int in bitmat.c (function static int _exists) to ensure bit shifting works. The bitmap support buffer is now initialized with zeros.

arules 1.7-0 (2021-11-13)

New Feature

Constructors and conversion
- constructor transactions() can now also create transactions from data in long format (tid, item).
- rules and itemsets have now a constructor.
- toLongFormat converts transactions into a long format data.frame.
Interest measures
- interestMeasure for rules has now measure "table" which returns the contingency table.
- new interest measure "riskRatio" was added.
- interestMeasure for contingency table-based measures now accept the additional parameter smoothCounts which is added to each count to avoid counts of zero (Laplace smoothing).
- new method for stats confint to calculate confidence intervals for some interest measures added.
- is_redundant can now also use confidence intervals to determine statistical redundancy.
- removed option "chiSquared" from crossTable.
Mining algorithms
- apriori and eclat gain ... additional arguments are now added to the parameter list.
- added new function is.generators to find itemset generators.
- apriori and eclat now store the call in the info slot of the created associations.

Changes

we use now a better check for installed suggested packages.
inspect uses now a space after the comma.
interestMeasures: reuse = TRUE now only reuses the basic measures of "support", "confidence", "coverage" and "lift". All other measures are recalculated to account for possible differences in additional parameters.
set methods are now also exported as S3 methods using package generics so they do not conflict with tidyverse (dplyr).

Bug Fixes

fixed mistake in man page for weclat. Weight column needs to be called weight (reported by Alexander Ruth).
frequent itemsets now do not report "transIdenticalToItemsets" (reported by galadrielbriere).
fixed read.transactions reading in single format with header from a connection. First item is no longer dropped.

arules 1.6-8 (2021-05-17)

New Feature

transactions have now a constructor function called transactions().
Added new method compatible() to itemMatrix to check if the item coding is compatible between two objects.
c() now produces a warning if two itemMatrices with different itemCoding are combined.
encode and recode accept now for itemLabels also objects with an itemLabels method.
recode is now also available for associations (itemsets and rules).

Changes

recode: parameter match is now deprecated. Use itemLabels

Bug Fixes

fixed addAggregate problem with character (reported by javiercoh).

arules 1.6-7 (2021-03-16)

New Features

Added interest measure confidence boost (boost) with help from Jens Harbers, Cordes & Graefe KG.

Bug Fixes

interest measure improvement now does not produce inf values if no subset rule can be found.

arules 1.6-6 (2020-05-15)

New Features

added interestMeasure rhsSupport.
added interestMeasure stdLift.
addComplement now adds variables and levels to indicate what items are complments.

Changes

apriori and eclat now by default also reports coverage (ext defaults to TRUE and lhs.support is now called coverage).
addComplement now adds variables and levels itemInfo.
discretize now drops non-unique breaks with a warning (instead of producing an error).

Bug Fixes

DATAFRAME now works if itemsetInfo is empty.
interestMeasure hyperlift now works without specifying transactions.
Changed c() to as.integer() for factors (R has changed).

arules 1.6-5 (2020-04-04)

New Features

improved speed for calculating interestMeasures for rules and itemsets with no available quality information or reuse = FALSE.
Manual pages for associations were improved with examples for itemCoding.
Manual page for interestMeasures is now linked with the associated web page.
interest measure laplace (Laplace confidence) gained parameter k for the number of classes.

Bug Fixes

read.transactions: Parameter encoding is now correctly passed on to scan (reported by Sisi-Wiciel).
interestMeasure was not calculating count for itemsets (reported by clcazer).
removed the duplicated interest measure: "descriptiveConfirm" use "confirmedConfidence" instead.

arules 1.6-4 (2019-08-29)

Bug Fixes

Fixed rounding bug affecting is.closed (reported by clcazer).
Fixed TYPO in Ralambondrainy Measure (reported by andreijl).

arules 1.6-3 (2019-03-07)

New Features

read.transactions gained parameter header to read files with column headers.

Bug Fixes

Fixed PROTECT placement in C code discovered by rchk.
S4 objects use now show instead of print.

arules 1.6-2 (2018-12-03)

New Features

discretizeDF now understands the method "none" which skips discretization.
discretizeDF now reports which column produces the problem.

Changes

transactions: numeric columns are now discretized during coercion using discretizeDF (with a warning).

Bug Fixes

The spurious warning for reaching maxlen in apriori is now removed (reported by Ryan J. Cole).
Fixed matrix check in function dissimilarity.

arules 1.6-1 (2018-04-07)

Bug Fixes

discretize now handles NAs in equal frequency (reported by yarik1988).
interestMeasure: fixed error when an itemset/rules object of length 0 is provided.

New Features

rules and itemsets gained a method for nitems.

arules 1.6-0 (2018-03-06)

Major Changes

discretize: the default method is now "frequency" and categories was renamed breaks to be consistent with cut in R-base.

New Features

Added interest measure "importance".
Added method items for transactions.
Added discretizeDF to apply discretization to all numeric columns in a data.frame.

Bug Fixes

Fixed typo in inspect for tidLists (reported by Carlos Chavarria).
Fixed bug in %in% for itemMatrix (reported by Henrique Lemos)

arules 1.5-5 (2018-01-10)

New Features

Added (absolute support) "count" as an interest measure.
itemLabels can now be assigned for rules and itemsets.

Bug Fixes

Fixed bug in subset with signature itemMatrix, itemMatrix (reported by rwdvc).
Fixed pointer punning warning.

arules 1.5-4 (2017-10-12)

New Features

Improved speed for read.transactions with format = "single" significantly.
Appearance for apriori now guesses the default parameter automatically and does some more checking, making the specification of templates easier.

Bug Fixes

Fixed null pointer in error message code.
head does now not result in an error for empty rule sets (bug reported by cornejom).

arules 1.5-3 (2017-09-01)

New Features

apriori and eclat return now count (absolute support count) in the quality data.frame.
Added %oin% to find transactions/itemsets that ONLY contain certain items.

Bug Fixes

Improved PROTECT placement in C source code.
itemMeasures for single rules/itemsets now returns a proper data.frame (reported by lordbitin).
itemMeasures: Added missing parentheses in kappa calculation and fixed equation for least contradiction (reported by Feng Chen).

arules 1.5-2 (2017-03-12)

New Features

apriori: maxtime = 0 disables the time limit.
is.subset/is.superset uses now fast and memory efficient C code for sparse computation (contributed by Ian Johnson). sparse = TRUE is now the default. Note that the result is now a sparse matrix.

arules 1.5-1

New Features

Added interest measure maxConf.
is.significant now supports in addition to Fisher's exact test, the chi-squared test.
interest measures Fisher's exact test and chi-squared (using significance = TRUE) can now produce p-values for substitutes (with complements = FALSE).
Added function DATAFRAME for more control over coercion to data.frame (e.g., use separate columns for LHS and RHS of rules).

Bug Fixes

Error message for sorting with an unknown interest measure.
abbreviate works now for rules correctly.

Internal Changes

Added registration code for native routines. This requires R 3.3.2.

arules 1.5-0 (2016-10-02)

Major Changes

apriori uses now a time limit set in the parameter list with maxtime. The default is 5 seconds. Running out of time or maxlen results in a warning. The warning for low absolute support was removed.

Bug Fixes

is.redundant now also marks rules with the same confidence as redundant.
plot for associations and transactions produces now a better error/warning message.
improved argument check for %pin%. Warns now for multiple patterns (was an error) and give an error for empty pattern.
inspect prints now consistently the index of rules/itemsets using brackets and starting from 1.

arules 1.4-2 (2016-08-06)

Bug Fixes

is.redundant returned !is.redundant (reported by brisbia)
Duplicate items when coercing from list to transactions are now removed with a warning.

arules 1.4-1 (2016-04-14)

New Features

added tail method for associations.
added/fixed encoding for read.transactions

Bug Fixes

Mutual information is now calculated correctly (reported by ddessommes).

arules 1.4-0 (2016-03-19)

New Features

The transaction class lost slot transactionInfo (we use the itemsetInfo slot now). Note that you may have to rebuild some transaction sets if you are using transactionInfo.
interestMeasure: performance improvement for "improvement" measure.
sort: speed up sort by always sorting NAs last.
head: added method head for associations for getting the best rules according to an interest measure faster than sorting all the associations first.
abbreviate is now a S4 generic with S4 methods.

Bug Fixes

combining item matrices with 0 rows (reported by C. Buchta).
itemLabel recoding in is.subset (reported by sjain777).
NAMESPACE export for %in%
is.redundant: fixed and performance improvement.
Groceries: fixed typo in dataset.

arules 1.3-1 (2015-12-14)

Major Changes

we now require R 3.2.0 so cbind in Matrix works.

New Features

is.maximal is now also available for rules.
added is.significant for rules (uses Fishers exact test with correction).
added is.redundant for rules.
added support for multi-level analysis (aggregate).
APparameter: confidence shows now NA for frequent itemsets.

arules 1.3-0 (2015-11-14)

New Features

removed deprecated WRITE and SORT functions.
subset extraction: added checks, handles now NAs and recycles for logical.
read.transactions gained arguments skip and quote and some defaults for read and write (uses now quotes and no rownames by default) have changed.
itemMatrix: coercion from matrix checks now for 0-1 matrix with a warning.
APRIORI and ECLAT report now absolute minimum support.
APRIORI: out-of-memory while rule building does now result in an error and not a memory fault.
aggregate uses now 'by' instead of 'itemLabels' to conform to aggregate in base.

Bug Fixes

ruleInduction: bug fix for missing confidence values and better checking (by C. Buchta).

arules 1.2-1 (2015-09-21)

New Features

Added many new interest measures.
interestMeasure: the formal argument method is now called measure (method is now deprecated).
Added Mushroom dataset.
Moved abbreviate from arulesViz to arules.

Bug Fixes

fixed undefined behavior for left shift in reclat.c (reported by B. Ripley)

arules 1.2-0 (2015-09-15)

Major Changes

added support for weighted association rule mining (by C. Buchta):
- transactions can store weights a column called "weight" in transactionInfo.
- support, itemFrequency and itemFrequencyPlot gained a parameter called weighted.
- weclat extends eclat with transaction weights.
- hits can be used to calculate weights from transact ions.
We are transitioning to internally use consistently data.frames with the correct number of rows for quality, itemInfo, transactionInfo and itemsetInfo. These data.frames possibly have 0 columns.
arules uses now testthat (tests are in tests/testthat).

New Features

sort can now sort by several columns (used to break ties) in quality. It also gained an order parameter to return a permutation vector (order) instead.
inspect gained parameters setStart, setEnd, itemSep, ruleSep and linebreak to control output better.
read.transactions now ignores empty items (e.g., caused by trailing commas and leading or trailing white spaces).
labels now returns not a list but consistent labels for objects
(transactions, itemMatrix, rules, itemsets, and tidLists).
tidLists has now an inspect method, gained coercion from "list", and has now a replacement method for dimnames().
Coercion from itemMatrix to matrix results now in a logical matrix.
fixed as(transactions, "data.frame"). The column names do now have no prefix (except if transactionInfo contains an item called "items").
transactions has now its own dimnames function which correctly returns transactionID from transactionInfo as rownames.
replacement method for dimnames() checks now dimensions.
item labels are now internally handled as character using stringAsFactor = FALSE in data.frames and not AsIs with I(character).
rules can now have no item in the RHS.

Bug Fixes

fixed missing row labels for is.subset().

arules 1.1-9 (2015-07-14)

More work on namespace.
Fixed tests.

arules 1.1-7 (2015-07-01)

itemUnion: fixed bug for large amounts of dense rules.
crossTable gained arguments measure and sort.
Fixed namespace imports for non-base default packages.

arules 1.1-6 (2014-12-08)

dissimilarity method "pearson" is now set to 1 (max) for neg. correlation. Also added phi correlation coefficient.
discretize method "cluster" accepts now ... passed on to k-means (e.g., for nstart)
merge for itemMatrix checks now for conformity
as(..., "transactions"): binary attributes are now translated into items only if TRUE.

arules 1.1-5 (2014-08-19)

Import drop0 from Matrix

arules 1.1-4 (2014-07-26)

C code: fixed problem in error message generation in apriori and eclat (this fixes the trio library problem under Windows)
C code: rapriori uses now STRING_ELT to be compatible with TERR (TIBCO)
C code: removed some unused variables.

arules 1.1-3 (2014-06-17)

Fixed dependency on XML and pmml
the interest measure chi-squared does now also report p-values (with significance=TRUE)
interestMeasure calculation checks now better for missing transactions
interestMeasure consistently returns now NA if not defined for a certain rule

arules 1.1-2 (2014-02-21)

discretize gained the parameter ordered.
itemwise set operations itemUnion, itemSetdiff and itemIntersect added.
validObject checks now rules more thoroughly
aggregate removes duplicate items from the lhs

arules 1.1-1 (2014-01-16)

is.superset/is.subset now makes sure that the two arguments conform using recode (number and order of items)
is.superset/is.subset returns now a matrix with appropriate dimnames
bug fix: fixed dimname bug in as(..., "dgCMatrix") for tidLists
image: labels are now passed on correctly.
tidLists has now c().

arules 1.1-0 (2013-12-12)

bug fix: reuse in now passed on correctly in interestMeasures (bug reported by Ying Leung)
direct coercions from and to dgCMatrix is no longer supported use ngCMatrix instead
coercion from ngCMatrix to itemMatrix and transactions is now possible
C code: fixed misaligned address on 64-bit systems

arules 1.0-15 (2013-09-06)

service release

arules 1.0-14 (2013-05-24)

discretize handles now NAs correctly
bug fix in is.subset

arules 1.0-13 (2013-04-07)

transactions: coercion form data.frame now handles logical automatically.
discretize replaces categorize and offers several additional methods

arules 1.0-12 (2012-11-28)

Added read and write for PMML.
'WRITE' is now deprecated, use 'write' instead
C code: Added a copy of the C subscript code from R for better performance and compatibility with arulesSequences

arules 1.0-11 (2012-11-19)

Fixed vignette.
Internal Changes for dimnames and subsetting

arules 1.0-10 (2012-09-03)

Added PACKAGE argument to C calls.
C code: Added C routine symbols to NAMESPACE for arulesSequence

arules 1.0-8 (2012-04-23)

fixed memory problem in eclat with tidLists=TRUE
added supportedTransactions()
is.subset/is.superset can not return a sparse matrix
added support to categorize continuous variables.

arules 1.0-7 (2011-11-04)

minor fixes (removed factor in dimnames for itemMatrix, warning in WRITE)
read.transactions now accepts column names to specify user and item columns (by F. Leisch)

arules 1.0-0 (2009-03-24)

Initial stable release version

arules 0.1-0 (2005-04-15)

Alpha and beta versions