Association rule learning is a critical technique in data mining aimed at identifying frequent patterns, correlations, or causal structures among sets of items in large datasets. This technique is especially valuable in market basket analysis, where it helps in understanding the co-occurrence of items purchased together. An association rule is often expressed in the form "If A, then B," where A and B are itemsets, and the rule's strength is measured by support and confidence metrics. Support indicates the frequency of the itemsets appearing together, while confidence measures the likelihood of B occurring when A occurs. More advanced metrics like lift and conviction are also used to refine the assessment of rule strength. This method has extensive applications in various domains, including retail, bioinformatics, and web usage mining.

The concept of association rules was first introduced in 1993 by Rakesh Agrawal, Tomasz Imieliński, and Arun Swami in their seminal paper on mining association rules between sets of items in large databases. The term gained significant popularity with the introduction of the Apriori algorithm by Agrawal and Srikant in 1994, which made the practical computation of these rules feasible by efficiently identifying frequent itemsets.

Rakesh Agrawal, Tomasz Imieliński, and Arun Swami are pivotal figures in the development of association rule learning, particularly through their early research and publications. Rakesh Agrawal, along with Ramakrishnan Srikant, further advanced the field with the development of the Apriori algorithm, a cornerstone in the practical application of association rule mining. Their contributions laid the groundwork for numerous advancements and applications in data mining and knowledge discovery.