Abstract
Mining association rules is to find relations among large amount of data so that the pattern of the dataset can be discovered. Many companies use association rules to find the relations among different items to improve their service quality of customers or enlarge their marketplace. Recently, many algorithms have been developed that only consider either non-quantitative data or quantitative data. However, in reality, most data we collected are mixed in types. Since Ant System allows to consider both of data types and has advantages of being efficient in filtering the unobvious association rules to reduce the unnecessary outputs and ease of making judgment to improve the performance, therefore, in this study, we adopted the technique and concept of Ant System to develop association rules. The developed algorithm is supported by theoretical evidence, and comparative studies are provided for evaluation.