A PSO-based algorithm for mining association rules using a guided exploration strategy

•A novel Particle swarm optimization based algorithm (PSO-GES), is introduced.•A guided exploration strategy in order to generate high-quality rules, is proposed.•A new fitness funtion for obtain the fitness value in a shorter runtime, is introduced.•PSO-GES uses a summary matrix with a smaller number of rows than the original database.•PSO-GES mines a set of better quality rules than the association rules mining algorithms compared.