In the first step of the proposed system which is Data Gathering and Integrating phase , we have collected data about
items sales of a building items market from several sources and files such as (text file, excel, access, …etc) that have been
existed in multiple sales departments of the market. Where collecting data from different sources usually presents many
challenges, because different departments will use different styles of record keeping, different conventions, different time
periods, different degrees of data aggregation, different primary keys, and will have different kinds of error. So the data
must be assembled, integrated in to one unified file which is (Microsoft Access file) in our system to be ready for
importing in to the C# environment for other data pre-processing techniques like resolving inconsistency and reduction.
In our proposed system, integration step led to emerging duplicated records (transactions) and inconsistent attributes
which are processed in the data pre-processing phase by applying proposed algorithms of reduction and consistency
techniques that are (Removing Duplication (Reduction) Algorithm) and (Resolving Inconsistency Algorithm). The
cleaned and prepared data from pre-processing phase are loaded into the data warehouse (DW) which is a wide data store
of the market that contains historical data and complete information about building items and has capability of modifying
its data and ready for processing phase. In order to mine vast amounts of data in the data warehouse for discovering
knowledge, part of the data should be selected and customized in the Data Selection phase, where we use the concept of
data mart to select and customize the data for processing phase depending on the technique used for knowledge discovery.
In Data Selection phase the set of items is selected for Data Mining and as input of the proposed (Index-based Apriori
Algorithm) because the used technique is Data Mining and specifically the Association functionality. In the discovering
knowledge phase, we use Data Mining and apply its Association functionality. The selected set of items is entered to the
proposed algorithm (Index-based Apriori) for mining association rules. The number of mining association rules are
different based on specified and entered min. count threshold for generating supported itemsets and min. confidence
threshold for generating interesting association rules. The market manager to be able of taking decisions and managing
the market resources, these rules must be interpreted for discovering knowledge to support the process of decision
making.
In the Association Rules Interpretation phase, we proposed and used an algorithm named (Association Rules
Interpretation Algorithm) applying a simple statistical method which is represented by substituting and counting the
items in the antecedent and consequent of the association rules. The results of this system represent the discovered
knowledge which is the predicted ratios of items sales for the next year. The results and visualization phase which we
explain and discuss in the next section, visualizes the results graphically using Line Chart tool to provide the decision
maker or the market manager with conceptual values (knowledge) supporting him in managing the market easily and in a
perfect way. Figure 3 has been shown below illustrates the flow chart of the proposed system.