Finding the True Frequent Itemsets

Frequent itemsets (FIs) mining from uncertain database is a very popular research area nowadays. Many algorithms have been proposed to mine FI from uncertain database. But in typical FI mining process, all the FIs have to be mined individually, which needs a huge memory. Four trees are proposed in this paper which are: (i) maximal frequent itemset from uncertain database (MFU) tree which contains only the maximal frequent itemsets generated from uncertain database, (ii) closed frequent itemset from uncertain database (CFU) tree which contains only closed frequent itemsets generated from uncertain database, (iii) maximal frequent itemset from uncertain data stream (MFUS) tree which contains maximal frequent itemsets generated from uncertain data stream and (iv) closed frequent itemset from uncertain data stream (CFUS) tree which contains closed frequent itemsets generated from uncertain data stream. Experimental results are also presented which show that maximal and closed frequent itemsets mining requires less time and memory than typical frequent itemsets mining.

Online mining of data streams is an important data mining problem with broad applications. However, it is also a difficult problem since the streaming data possess some inherent characteristics. In this paper, we propose a new single-pass algorithm, called DSM-FI (data stream mining for frequent itemsets), for online incremental mining of frequent itemsets over a continuous stream of online transactions. According to the proposed algorithm, each transaction of the stream is projected into a set of sub-transactions, and these sub-transactions are inserted into a new in-memory summary data structure, called SFI-forest (summary frequent itemset forest) for maintaining the set of all frequent itemsets embedded in the transaction data stream generated so far. Finally, the set of all frequent itemsets is determined from the current SFI-forest. Theoretical analysis and experimental studies show that the proposed DSM-FI algorithm uses stable memory, makes only one pass over an online transactional data stream, and outperforms the existing algorithms of one-pass mining of frequent itemsets.

SufRec, an algorithm for mining association rules: Recursivity and task parallelism

Frequent itemset mining over dynamic data is an important problem in the context of knowledge discovery and data mining. Various data stream models are being used for mining frequent itemsets. In a data stream model the data arrive at high speed such that the algorithms used for mining data streams must process them in strict constraint of time and space. Due to emphasis over recent data and its bounded memory requirement, sliding window model is a widely used model for mining frequent itemset over data stream. In this paper we proposed an algorithm named Variable-Moment for mining both frequent and closed frequent itemset over data stream. The algorithm is appropriate for noticing latest or new changes in the set of frequent itemset by making its window size variable, which is determined dynamically based on the extent of concept drift occurring within the arriving data stream. The size of window expands when there is no concept drift in the arriving data stream and size shrinks when there is a concept change. The relative support instead of absolute support is being used for making the concept of variable window effective. The algorithm uses an in-memory data structure to store frequent itemsets. Data structure gets updated whenever a batch of transaction is added or deleted from the sliding window to output exact frequent itemsets. Extensive experiments on both real and synthetic data show that our algorithm excellently spots the concept changes and adapts itself to the new concept along data stream by adjusting window size.

Constraint Programming is becoming competitive for solving certain data-mining problems largely due to the development of global constraints. We introduce the CoverSize constraint for itemset mining problems, a global constraint for counting and constraining the number of transactions covered by the itemset decision variables. We show the relation of this constraint to the well-known table constraint, and our filtering algorithm internally uses the reversible sparse bitset data structure recently proposed for filtering table. Furthermore, we expose the size of the cover as a variable, which opens up new modelling perspectives compared to an existing global constraint for (closed) frequent itemset mining. For example, one can constrain minimum frequency or compare the frequency of an itemset in different datasets as is done in discriminative itemset mining. We demonstrate experimentally on the frequent, closed and discriminative itemset mining problems that the CoverSize constraint with reversible sparse bitsets allows to outperform other CP approaches.

Data mining has made a significant impact on business and knowledge management in recent years. Data mining also known as KDD is a powerful new technology having great potential to analyze useful information stored in large data bases. Association rule mining is an active research area, used to find association and/or correlation among frequent item sets. Association rule mining discover frequent item sets with out considering total cost, quantity and number of items in a transaction. Utility based frequent item set mining is a new research area, which provide importance to sale quantity and price among items in a transaction. In this paper, we have proposed a novel approach for utility frequent item set mining. Our method mines novel frequent item sets by giving importance to items quantity, significance weightage, utility and user defined support. Our approach can be used to provide valuable recommendation to the enterprise to improve business utility.

Frequent itemset mining and association rule mining are fundamental problems in data mining. Despite of the intensive and continuous researches on frequent itemset mining, one essential and not completely solved drawback still remains. The drawback is pattern explosion: a huge number of frequent itemsets, or patterns, will be often derived. The association rule mining takes over the same drawback since each association rule consists of two frequent itemsets. One promising solution for alleviating this essential drawback practically as a post-processing is to rank the patterns and rules from various aspects and to identify which one to be examined first. In this paper, we propose to utilize the technology of representation learning to rank frequent itemsets and association rules. More specifically, we develop several evaluation measures for frequent itemsets and association rules by using the vector representations of items, transactions and frequent patterns which are obtained by existing representation learning techniques. By employing vector representations of three kinds of objects, various rankings reflecting different aspects can expect to be obtained.

Frequent itemsets mining is one of the interesting applications of data mining. Recently data mining has got a great deal of attention due to the explosive growth in data and the economic and scientific need for turning such data into useful information. However, the traditional frequent itemsets mining algorithms have become inefficient to work with large datasets effectively on a single machine due to computational power and memory limits. Current methods prefer to control the execution time and output by using higher minimum support thresholds, which lead to less candidates and frequent itemsets. In this paper, an improved-version of Apriori like HFDM-EB algorithm that can deal with lower minimum support thresholds is proposed for mining frequent itemsets over big transactional data on Hadoop framework and by utilizing compressed bitmaps. The experimental results show that the improved algorithm is efficient and scalable for mining frequent itemsets in big data.

Frequent itemset mining is a popular and important first step in the analysis of data arising in a broad range of applications. The traditional “exact” model for frequent itemsets requires that every item occur in each supporting transaction. However, real data is typically subject to noise and measurement error. To date, the effect of noise on exact frequent pattern mining algorithms have been addressed primarily through simulation studies, and there has been limited attention to the development of noise tolerant algorithms. In this paper we propose a noise tolerant itemset model, which we call approximate frequent itemsets (AFI). Like frequent itemsets, the AFI model requires that an itemset has a minimum number of supporting transactions. However, the AFI model tolerates a controlled fraction of errors in each item and each supporting transaction. Motivating this model are theoretical results (and a supporting simulation study presented here) which state that, in the presence of even low levels of noise, large frequent itemsets are broken into fragments of logarithmic size; thus the itemsets cannot be recovered by a routine application of frequent itemset mining. By contrast, we provide theoretical results showing that the AFI criterion is well suited to recovery of block structures subject to noise. We developed and implemented an algorithm to mine AFIs that generalizes the level-wise enumeration of frequent itemsets by allowing noise. We propose the noise-tolerant support threshold, a relaxed version of support, which varies with the length of the itemset and the noise threshold. We exhibit an Apriori property that permits the pruning of an itemset if any of its sub-itemset is not sufficiently supported. Several experiments presented demonstrate that the AFI algorithm enables better recoverability of frequent patterns under noisy conditions than existing frequent itemset mining approaches. Noise-tolerant support pruning also renders an order of magnitude performance gain over existing methods.

Mining frequent itemsets is a fundamental task in data mining. Unfortunately the number of frequent itemsets describing the data is often too large to comprehend. This problem has been attacked by condensed representations of frequent itemsets that are subcollections of frequent itemsets containing only the frequent itemsets that cannot be deduced from other frequent itemsets in the subcollection, using some deduction rules. In this paper we review the most popular condensed representations of frequent itemsets, study their relationship to transaction databases and each other, examine their combinatorial and computational complexity, and describe their relationship to other important concepts in combinatorial data analysis, such as Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension and hypergraph transversals.

Frequent itemset mining is an important problem in the data mining area. Extensive efforts have been devoted to developing efficient algorithms for mining frequent itemsets. However, not much attention is paid on managing the large collection of frequent itemsets produced by these algorithms for subsequent analysis and for user exploration. In this paper, we study three structures for indexing and querying frequent itemsets: inverted files, signature files and CFP-tree. The first two structures have been widely used for indexing general set-valued data. We make some modifications to make them more suitable for indexing frequent itemsets. The CFP-tree structure is specially designed for storing frequent itemsets. We add a pruning technique based on length-2 frequent itemsets to make it more efficient for processing superset queries. We study the performance of the three structures in supporting five types of containment queries: exact match, subset/superset search and immediate subset/superset search. Our results show that no structure can outperform other structures for all the five types of queries on all the datasets. CFP-tree shows better overall performance than the other two structures.

The goal of data mining algorithm is to discover useful information embedded in large databases. Frequent itemset mining and sequential pattern mining are two important data mining problems with broad applications. Perhaps the most efficient way to solve these problems sequentially is to apply a pattern-growth algorithm, which is a divide-and-conquer algorithm [9, 10]. In this paper, we present a framework for parallel mining frequent itemsets and sequential patterns based on the divide-and-conquer strategy of pattern growth. Then, we discuss the load balancing problem and introduce a sampling technique, called selective sampling, to address this problem. We implemented parallel versions of both frequent itemsets and sequential pattern mining algorithms following our framework. The experimental results show that our parallel algorithms usually achieve excellent speedups.

Efficient and accurate personalized product recommendations through frequent item set mining fusion algorithm

Mining of frequent itemsets is a fundamental data mining task. Past research has proposed many efficient algorithms for this purpose. Recent work also highlighted the importance of using constraints to focus the mining process to mine only those relevant itemsets. In practice, data mining is often an interactive and iterative process. The user typically changes constraints and runs the mining algorithm many times before being satisfied with the final results. This interactive process is very time consuming. Existing mining algorithms are unable to take advantage of this iterative process to use previous mining results to speed up the current mining process. This results in an enormous waste of time and computation. In this paper, we propose an efficient technique to utilize previous mining results to improve the efficiency of current mining when constraints are changed. We first introduce the concept of tree boundary to summarize useful information available from previous mining. We then show that the tree boundary provides an effective and efficient framework for the new mining. The proposed technique has been implemented in the context of two existing frequent itemset mining algorithms, FP-tree and tree projection. Experiment results on both synthetic and real-life datasets show that the proposed approach achieves a dramatic saving of computation.

Mining frequent itemsets from transactional datasets is a well known problem. Thus, various methods have been studied to deal with this issue. Recently, original proposals have emerged from the cross-fertilization between data mining and artificial intelligence. In these declarative approaches, the itemset mining problem is modeled either as a constraint network or a propositional formula whose models correspond to the patterns of interest. In this paper, we focus on the propositional satisfiability based itemset mining framework. Our main goal is to enhance the efficiency of SAT model enumeration algorithms. This issue is particularly crucial for the scalability and competitiveness of such declarative itemset mining approaches. In this context, we deeply analyse the effect of the different SAT solver components on the efficiency of the model enumeration problem. Our analysis includes the main components of modern SAT solvers such as restarts, activity based variable ordering heuristics and clauses learning mechanism. Through extensive experiments, we show that these classical components play an essential role in such procedure to improve the performance by pushing forward the efficiency of SAT solvers. More precisely, our experimental evaluation includes a comparative study in enumerating all the models corresponding to the closed frequent itemsets. Additionally, our experimental analysis is extended to include the Top-k itemset mining problem.