Abstract
                                                                         Conventional    Association    Rule    Mining    (ARM)    algorithms  usually  deal  with  datasets  with  binary  values,  and  expect  any  numerical  values  to  be  converted  to  binary  ones  using sharp partitions, like Age = 25 to 60. In order to mitigate this  constraint,  Fuzzy  logic  is  used  to  convert  quantitative  values of attributes to binary ones, so as to eliminate any loss of information  arising  due  to  sharp  partitioning,  especially  at  partition boundaries, and then generate fuzzy association rules. But, before any fuzzy ARM algorithm can be used, the original dataset  (with  crisp  attributes)  needs  to  be  transformed  into  a  form    with    fuzzy    attributes.    This    paper    describes    a    methodology,  called  FPrep,  to  do  this  pre-processing,  which  first involves using fuzzy clustering to generate fuzzy partitions, and then uses these partitions to get a fuzzy version (with fuzzy records)  of  the  original  dataset.  Ultimately,  the  fuzzy  data  (fuzzy records) are represented in a standard manner such that they can be used as input to any kind of fuzzy ARM algorithm, irrespective  of  how  it  works  and  processes  fuzzy  data.  We  also  show  that  FPrep  is  much  faster  than  other  such  comparable  transformation  techniques,  which  in  turn  depend  on  non-fuzzy  techniques,   like   hard   clustering   (CLARANS   and   CURE).   Moreover,  we  illustrate  the  quality  of  the  fuzzy  partitions  generated  using  FPrep,  and  the  number  of  frequent  itemsets  generated by a fuzzy ARM algorithm when preceded by FPrep.