Apriori Algorithm

The Apriori algorithm, introduced by Agrawal and Srikant in 1994, is the foundational method for discovering frequent itemsets and association rules in transactional databases. It uses a breadth-first, level-wise search guided by the anti-monotone property of support to efficiently enumerate all item combinations that co-occur above a user-set minimum threshold, then extracts interpretable if-then rules from those patterns.