What you are experiencing is not uncommon.  From a software standpoint, there is not a reliable way to identify which rules are useful or important since this depends on the business scenario.   Commonly reported statistics such as Lift, Confidence, and Support do not necessarily do a good job of identifying useful rules by themselves.  Modifying your node settings to obtain fewer rules can help limit the total number of rules but there is no guarantee that you are not suppressing rules which you would be highly interested in.  Given that you are planning on filtering the rules (which is a great strategy), I would suggest that you contact SAS Tech Support to get some direction on how to modify the node .XML file to allow a larger number of rules.     Hope this helps! Doug ... View more