Association analysis enables you to identify items that have an affinity for each other. It is frequently used to analyze transactional data (also called market baskets) to identify items that often appear together in transactions. For example, grocery stores and online merchants use association analysis to strategically organize and recommend products that tend to be purchased together.

Association analysis is also used for identifying dependent or associated events. For example, you can identify car parts that seem to fail around the same time. In this application, car inspections are treated as the market baskets and you analyze the associations among groups of faulty parts found in each inspection.