Writing rules generated by Apriori

Question

I'm working with some large transactions data. I've been using read.transactions and apriori (parts of the arules package) to mine for frequent item pairings.

My problem is this: when rules are generated (using "inspect()") I can easily view them in the R console. Right now I'm manually copying the results into a text file, then saving and opening in excel. I'd like to just save the generated rules using write.csv, or something similar, but when I try, I receive an error that the data cannot be coerced into data.frame.

Does anyone have experience doing this successfully in R?

Answer 1

I know I'm answering my own question, but I found out that the solution is to use as() to convert the rules into a data frame. [I'm new to R, so I missed this my first time searching for a solution.] From there, it can easily be manipulated in any way you'd like (sub setting, sorting, exporting, etc.).

> mba = read.transactions(file="Book2.csv",rm.duplicates=FALSE, format="single", sep=",",cols=c(1,2));

> rules_1 <- apriori(mba,parameter = list(sup = 0.001, conf = 0.01, target="rules"));

> as(rules_1, "data.frame");

Answer 2

Another way to achieve that would be:

write(rules_1,
      file = "association_rules.csv",
      sep = ",",
      quote = TRUE,
      row.names = FALSE)

Answer 3

I found this post when struggling with writing my rules to excel. My solution is:

library(writexl)

write_xlsx(as(rules_1, "data.frame"), "rules_1.xlsx")

It is much easier to read and report when it is in excel.