Association Rule Mining Technique for Psychometric Personality Testing and Behaviour Prediction Syed Khalid Perwez !1 , Hamza Mohd. Zubair *2 , Muhammad Rukunuddin Ghalib #3 , Kauser Ahmed P #4 , Mohammed Iftekhar †5 ! VIT Business School, * Dept. of Cognitive Science, # School of Computing Science and Engineering, † Dept. of Biotechnology 1, 3, 4 VIT University, Vellore, India 2 Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar 5 Dayananda Sagar Institutions, Bangalore 1 khalid_mba@rediffmail.com 2 hamzazubair2009@hotmail.com 3 ghalib.it@gmail.com 4 kauserahmed@vit.ac.in 5 iftubip@gmail.com Abstract— At the heart of personality psychology lies one single fundamental motive and that is to be able to anticipate how an individual will think, behave and feel at any future instant. Quite unfortunately this field has not been very successful in achieving this. Though this field has given us great insights about the working of the mind, cognitive processes and emotions, it has failed to accomplish its central objective i.e., to predict human behaviour. We p r o p o s e i n t h i s p a p e r a n o v e l t e c h n i q u e of predicting human behaviour without the need of any abstracti on about the mind or its internal workings. We propose the use of simple and straightforward statistics for this purpose. Applying simple association rule mining on behaviours of thousands of people, association rules having high confidence values can be identified. And based on these rules, strong conclusions can be made in anticipating the behaviour of an individual. An analytical study was conducted on answers provided by 1414 candidates to a 163-question personality survey. The survey was based on the famous questionnaire prepared by Raymond Cattell. This survey was chosen to first try and prove the ambiguity in the current psychological concepts. Following that simple association rule mining was applied on the data to obtain associations between variables. The strongest association obtained with 97.2% confidence was an inter-class association rather than an intra- class association as would be expected from traditional psychology point-of-view. Keyword- Personality Psychology; Personality Theories; Raymond Cattell’s personality factor; Data Mining; Association Rule Mining I. INTRODUCTION As our understanding of this universe grows amidst the swelling breadths and depths of our knowledgebase, we are increasingly made aware of the fact that nothing in this universe is compartmentalized. The universe has proved that it cannot be classified or divided into parts rather there is a gradient everywhere and an unclassifiable diversity is present everywhere we look. Earlier we used to divide the heavenly bodies into stars, the sun and the moon. Now we have discovered a variety of heavenly objects of varying sizes and shapes. Life on earth was either plants or animals; the animals were classified into insects, mammals, birds and fishes. One of the first attempts at classifying the living beings by Carl Linnaeus gives a hint of this fact. And now as time passes our classification systems have begun to increase in complexity, now there are amphibians, flightless birds, etc. Today, even the division into flora and fauna is considered artificial. Now this earth is not even classified into the living and the non- living, because we have such things as viruses that blur the border between the living and the non-living. Man has been on the search for an answer to what personality is from the start of time, but apart from a few useful insights we have not been able to provide a conclusive answer to what a personality is and how it works. No doubt we have spent more than two thousand years already in the hunt for a convincing answer. Yet in this paper we argue that the real motive behind the search for a satisfying answer to what personality actually is, is not greater understanding of this world through a better understanding of how our minds work. The objective is not just to be able to comprehend the complete nature of a mind by understanding various individual personalities; we argue that most likely the real motive behind the urge to make complete sense of human psych stems from the desire to predict. Humans crave for prediction and they try to predict whenever they are able to perceive any sort of patterns. This craving for prediction enforces us to look for the underlying thread of abstract ideas that can explain everything we perceive about an individual’s thoughts, Syed Khalid Perwez et.al / International Journal of Engineering and Technology (IJET) ISSN : 0975-4024 Vol 5 No 5 Oct-Nov 2013 4349