Int. J. Data Mining and Bioinformatics, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2017 1 Copyright © 2017 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Fuzzy-soft-fuzzy set model for mining amino acid associations in peptide sequences of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC) Amita Jain* A-1006, Vraj Green Valley, Kolshet Road, Thane 400607, Maharashtra, India Email: amita.jain01@gmail.com *Corresponding author Kamal Raj Pardasani 2/8, MANIT Colony, Bhopal, 462051, M.P., India Email: kamalrajp@rediffmail.com Abstract: The massive volumes of molecular data are available in online databases. The different types of inherent uncertainties present in this molecular data pose major challenge in the analysis of this data. The existing algorithms for association rule mining are not completely capable in dealing with these uncertainties. In the present paper a fuzzy soft fuzzy approach is proposed for mining amino acid associations in molecular sequences of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC). The data consisting of peptide sequences of MTBC is transformed into fuzzy transactional dataset using the fuzzy set. The soft set is employed to transform fuzzy transactions into soft fuzzy transactions. The fuzzy set is again employed to transform soft fuzzy transaction into fuzzy soft fuzzy transactions. The association rule mining is performed to generate amino acid association patterns. It is observed that the proposed approach prunes the spurious patterns and recovers the missing patterns obtained by the existing approaches. Keywords: data mining; association rule; support; confidence; fuzzy set; soft set; transaction; fuzzy-soft-fuzzy set; Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex; uncertainty. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Jain, A. and Pardasani K.R. (2017) ‘Fuzzy-soft-fuzzy set model for mining amino acid associations in peptide sequences of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC)’, Int. J. Data Mining and Bioinformatics, Vol. 17, No. 1, pp.1–24. Biographical notes: Amita Jain obtained PhD in the area of data mining from Department of Computer Application, Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology, MANIT, Bhopal, India. She received her Master’s degree in Information Technology from Dr. H. S. Gour University, Sagar, India. She has published various papers in renowned journals like Network Modeling Analysis in Health Informatics and Bioinformatics, Springer, Current Science, Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems.