Association rule mining is used to find interesting relationships among data items in large datasets. It can help with business decision making by analyzing customer purchasing patterns. For example, market basket analysis looks at what items are frequently bought together. Association rules use support and confidence metrics, where support is the probability an itemset occurs and confidence is the probability that a rule is correct. The Apriori algorithm is commonly used to generate association rules by first finding frequent itemsets that meet a minimum support threshold across multiple passes of the data. It then generates rules from those itemsets if they meet a minimum confidence. Association rule mining has various applications and can provide useful insights but also has computational limitations.