Clustering and relationship is in type of which relationship?
Cluster analysis or clustering is the task of grouping a set of objects in such a way that objects in the same group (called a cluster) are more similar (in some sense or another) to each other than to those in other groups (clusters).
Source: Wikipedia
Association rule learning is a method for discovering interesting relations between variables in large databases.
Source: Wikipedia
So both, clustering and association rule mining (ARM), are in the field of unsupervised machine learning. Clustering is about the data points, ARM is about finding relationships between the attributes of those data points.
However, I wonder if there are more relationships. For example, given clustering, can this enhance / simplify ARM or vice versa?
The paper
Marie Plasse et al: Combined use of association rules mining and clustering methods to find relevant links between binary rare attributes in a large data set. Link Combining both, clustering and association is a type of rule mining. They could improve ARM by association rule mining. From the abstract: A method to analyze links between binary attributes in a large sparse data set is proposed. Initially the variables are clustered to obtain homogeneous clusters of attributes. Association rules are then mined in each cluster. A graphical comparison of some rule relevancy indexes is presented. It is used to extract the best rules depending on the application concerned. The proposed methodology is illustrated by an industrial application from the automotive industry with more than 80 000 vehicles each described by more than 3000 rare attributes.