There are many ways to see the similarities between items. These are techniques that fall under the general umbrella of association. The outcome of this type of technique, in simple terms, is a set of rules that can be understood as “if this, then that”.

Imagine 10000 receipts sitting on your table. Each receipt represents a transaction with items that were purchased. The receipt is a representation of stuff that went into a customer’s basket – and therefore ‘Market Basket Analysis’.

That is exactly what the Groceries Data Set contains: a collection of receipts with each line representing 1 receipt and the items purchased. Each line is called a transaction and each column in a row represents an item.