Association rule mining is one of the most popular pattern discovery methods used in data mining. Frequent pattern extraction is an essential step in association rule mining. Most of the proposed algorithms for extracting frequent patterns are based on the downward closure lemma concept utilizing the support and confidence framework. In this paper we investigate an alternative method for mining frequent patterns in a transactional database. Self-Organizing Map (SOM) is an unsupervised neural

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... work that effectively creates spatially organized internal representations of the features and abstractions detected in the input space. It is one of the most popular clustering techniques and it reveals existing similarities in the input space by performing a topology preserving mapping. These promising properties indicate that such a clustering technique can be used to detect frequent patterns in a top-down manner as opposed to the traditional approach that employs a bottom-up lattice search. Issues that are frequently raised when using clustering technique for the purpose of finding association rules are: (i) the completeness of association rule set (ii) The support level for the rules generated (iii) the confidence level for the rules generated. We present some case studies analyzing the relationships between the SOM approach and the traditional association rule framework and propose a way to constrain the clustering technique so that the traditional support constraint can be approximated. Throughout our experiments, we have demonstrated how a clustering approach can be used for discovering frequent patterns.