Elicitation of Association Rules from Information on Customs Offences on the Basis of Frequent Motives

Abstract

The fight against fraud and trafficking is a fundamental mission of customs. The conditions for carrying out this mission depend both on the evolution of economic issues and on the behaviour of the actors in charge of its implementation. As part of the customs clearance process, customs are nowadays confronted with an increasing volume of goods in connection with the development of international trade. Automated risk management is therefore required to limit intrusive control. In this article, we propose an unsupervised classification method to extract knowledge rules from a database of customs offences in order to identify abnormal behaviour resulting from customs control. The idea is to apply the Apriori principle on the basis of frequent grounds on a database relating to customs offences in customs procedures to uncover potential rules of association between a customs operation and an offence for the purpose of extracting knowledge governing the occurrence of fraud. This mass of often heterogeneous and complex data thus generates new needs that knowledge extraction methods must be able to meet. The assessment of infringements inevitably requires a proper identification of the risks. It is an original approach based on data mining or data mining to build association rules in two steps: first, search for frequent patterns (support >= minimum support) then from the frequent patterns, produce association rules (Trust >= Minimum Trust). The simulations carried out highlighted three main association rules: forecasting rules, targeting rules and neutral rules with the introduction of a third indicator of rule relevance which is the Lift measure. Confidence in the first two rules has been set at least 50%.