Efficient Discovery of Association Rules in E-Commerce: Comparing Candidate Generation and Pattern Growth Techniques

Association rule mining plays a critical role in uncovering item correlations and hidden patterns within transactional data, particularly in e-commerce environments. Despite the widespread use of Apriori and FP-Growth algorithms, few studies offer a statistically rigorous, tool-based comparison of their performance on real-world e-commerce data. This paper addresses this gap by evaluating both algorithms in terms of execution time, memory consumption, rule generation volume, and rule strength (support, confidence, and lift). Implementations in RapidMiner and an analysis through SPSS establish statistically significant performance differences, particularly under varying support thresholds. Our findings confirm that FP-Growth consistently outperforms Apriori for large-scale datasets due to its ability to bypass candidate generation, while Apriori retains pedagogical and small-scale relevance. The study contributes practical guidance for data scientists and e-commerce practitioners choosing suitable rule-mining techniques based on their data size and performance constraints.