Mining association rules is a task of data mining, which extracts knowledge in the form of significant implication relation of useful items (objects) from a database. Mining multilevel association rules uses concept hierarchies, also called taxonomies and defined as relations of type 'is-a' between objects, to extract rules that items belong to different levels of abstraction. These rules are more useful, more refined and more interpretable by the user. Several algorithms have been proposed in the literature to discover the multilevel association rules. In this article, we are interested in the problem of discovering multi-level frequent itemsets under constraints, involving the user in the research process. We proposed a technique for modeling and interpretation of constraints in a context of use of concept hierarchies. Three approaches for discovering multi-level frequent itemsets under constraints were proposed and discussed: Basic approach, "Test and Generate" approach and Pruning based Approach.
National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences（国家计算机与新兴科学大学）
Mining frequent itemset using bit-vector representation approach is very efficient for dense type datasets, but highly inefficient for sparse datasets due to lack of any efficient bit-vector projection technique. In this paper we present a novel efficient bit-vector projection technique, for sparse and dense datasets. To check the efficiency of our bit-vector projection technique, we present a new frequent itemset mining algorithm Ramp (Real Algorithm for Mining Patterns) build upon our bit-vector projection technique. The performance of the Ramp is compared with the current best (all, maximal…
Mining frequent itemsets is an essential problem in data mining and plays an important role in many data mining applications. In recent years, some itemset representations based on node sets have been proposed, which have shown to be very efficient for mining frequent itemsets. In this paper, we propose DiffNodeset, a novel and more efficient itemset representation, for mining frequent itemsets. Based on the DiffNodeset structure, we present an efficient algorithm, named dFIN, to mining frequent itemsets. To achieve high efficiency, dFIN finds frequent itemsets using a set-enumeration tree wit…
FAST-National University of Computer and Emerging Science（FAST-国家计算机与新兴科学大学）
Real world datasets are sparse, dirty and contain hundreds of items. In such situations, discovering interesting rules (results) using traditional frequent itemset mining approach by specifying a user defined input support threshold is not appropriate. Since without any domain knowledge, setting support threshold small or large can output nothing or a large number of redundant uninteresting results. Recently a novel approach of mining only N-most/Top-K interesting frequent itemsets has been proposed, which discovers the top N interesting results without specifying any user defined support thre…
FAST-National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences（FAST-国立计算机与新兴科学大学）
In this paper we present a novel hybrid (arraybased layout and vertical bitmap layout) database representation approach for mining complete Maximal Frequent Itemset (MFI) on sparse and large datasets. Our work is novel in terms of scalability, item search order and two horizontal and vertical projection techniques. We also present a maximal algorithm using this hybrid database representation approach. Different experimental results on real and sparse benchmark datasets show that our approach is better than previous state of art maximal algorithms.
CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；University of Montpellier（蒙彼利埃大学）；Simula Research Laboratory（Simula研究实验室）；LIRMM（蒙彼利埃计算机、机器人与微电子实验室）
Itemset mining is one of the most studied tasks in knowledge discovery. In this paper we analyze the computational complexity of three central itemset mining problems. We prove that mining confident rules with a given item in the head is NP-hard. We prove that mining high utility itemsets is NP-hard. We finally prove that mining maximal or closed itemsets is coNP-hard as soon as the users can specify constraints on the kind of itemsets they are interested in.
In this paper, we propose a novel data structure called PUN-list, which maintains both the utility information about an itemset and utility upper bound for facilitating the processing of mining high utility itemsets. Based on PUN-lists, we present a method, called MIP (Mining high utility Itemset using PUN-Lists), for fast mining high utility itemsets. The efficiency of MIP is achieved with three techniques. First, itemsets are represented by a highly condensed data structure, PUN-list, which avoids costly, repeatedly utility computation. Second, the utility of an itemset can be efficiently ca…
CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；University of Montpellier（蒙彼利埃大学）；University of Oran 1（奥兰第一大学）；CRIL, University of Artois（阿尔图瓦大学CRIL实验室）
Discovering significant itemsets is one of the fundamental problems in data mining. It has recently been shown that constraint programming is a flexible way to tackle data mining tasks. With a constraint programming approach, we can easily express and efficiently answer queries with users constraints on items. However, in many practical cases it is possible that queries also express users constraints on the dataset itself. For instance, asking for a particular itemset in a particular part of the dataset. This paper presents a general constraint programming model able to handle any kind of quer…
Simula Research Laboratory（西穆拉研究实验室）；LIRMM, University of Montpellier, CNRS（蒙彼利埃大学法国国家科学研究中心蒙彼利埃信息与机器人学实验室）
The problem of discovering frequent itemsets including rare ones has received a great deal of attention. The mining process needs to be flexible enough to extract frequent and rare regularities at once. On the other hand, it has recently been shown that constraint programming is a flexible way to tackle data mining tasks. In this paper, we propose a constraint programming approach for mining itemsets with multiple minimum supports. Our approach provides the user with the possibility to express any kind of constraints on the minimum item supports. An experimental analysis shows the practical ef…
In this paper we present a new error bound on sampling algorithms for frequent itemsets mining. We show that the new bound is asymptotically tighter than the state-of-art bounds, i.e., given the chosen samples, for small enough error probability, the new error bound is roughly half of the existing bounds. Based on the new bound, we give a new approximation algorithm, which is much simpler compared to the existing approximation algorithms, but can also guarantee the worst approximation error with precomputed sample size. We also give an algorithm which can approximate the top-$k$ frequent items…
High Utility Itemset (HUI) mining problem is one of the important problems in the data mining literature. The problem offers greater flexibility to a decision maker to incorporate her/his notion of utility into the pattern mining process. The problem, however, requires the decision maker to choose a minimum utility threshold value for discovering interesting patterns. This is quite challenging due to the disparate itemset characteristics and their utility distributions. In order to address this issue, Top-K High Utility Itemset (THUI) mining problem was introduced in the literature. THUI minin…
High-utility itemset mining finds itemsets from a transaction database with utility no less than a fixed user-defined threshold. The utility of an itemset is defined as the sum of the utilities of its item. Several algorithms were proposed to mine high-utility itemsets. However, no state-of-the-art algorithm performs consistently good across dense and sparse datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel data structure called Utility-Tree, and a tree-based algorithm called UT-Miner that mines high-utility itemsets in one-phase only without generating any candidates and uses a lightweight construc…
Itemset mining has been an active area of research due to its successful application in various data mining scenarios including finding association rules. Though most of the past work has been on finding frequent itemsets, infrequent itemset mining has demonstrated its utility in web mining, bioinformatics and other fields. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm based on the pattern-growth paradigm to find minimally infrequent itemsets. A minimally infrequent itemset has no subset which is also infrequent. We also introduce the novel concept of residual trees. We further utilize the residua…
Frequent itemset mining has emerged as a fundamental problem in data mining and plays an important role in many data mining tasks, such as association analysis, classification, etc. In the framework of frequent itemset mining, the results are itemsets that are frequent in the whole database. However, in some applications, such recommendation systems and social networks, people are more interested in finding out the items that occur with some user-specified itemsets (query itemsets) most frequently in a database. In this paper, we address the problem by proposing a new mining task named top-k c…
So far, most of association rule minings have considered about positive association rules based on frequent itemsets in databases[2,5-7], but they have not considered the problem of mining negative association rules correlated with frequent and infrequent itemsets. Negative association rule mining is much more difficult than positive association rule mining because it needs infrequent itemsets, and only the rare association rule mining which is a kind of negative association rule minings has been studied. This paper presents a mathematical model to mine positive and negative association rules …
University of Oran 1（奥兰第一大学）；University of Montpellier（蒙彼利埃大学）；University of Caen（卡昂大学）
Discovering the set of closed frequent patterns is one of the fundamental problems in Data Mining. Recent Constraint Programming (CP) approaches for declarative itemset mining have proven their usefulness and flexibility. But the wide use of reified constraints in current CP approaches raises many difficulties to cope with high dimensional datasets. This paper proposes CLOSED PATTERN global constraint which does not require any reified constraints nor any extra variables to encode efficiently the Closed Frequent Pattern Mining (CFPM) constraint. CLOSED-PATTERN captures the particular semantics…
In this paper we propose a R-step approximation to solve frequent itemset mining on quantum hardware like quantum annealing or QAOA. The idea is to search for the set of items where the minimal 2-item frequency is maximal. This can be represented as a maximum clique problem.
In this paper, we propose an algorithm of searching for both positive and negative itemsets of interest which should be given at the first stage for positive and negative association rules mining. Traditional association rule mining algorithms extract positive association rules based on frequent itemsets, for which the frequent itemsets, i.e. only positive itemsets of interest are searched. Further, there are useful itemsets among the frequent itemsets pruned from the traditional algorithms to reduce the search space, for mining of negative association rules. Therefore, the traditional algorit…
Frequent itemset mining is a popular data mining technique. Apriori, Eclat, and FP-Growth are among the most common algorithms for frequent itemset mining. Considerable research has been performed to compare the relative performance between these three algorithms, by evaluating the scalability of each algorithm as the dataset size increases. While scalability as data size increases is important, previous papers have not examined the performance impact of similarly sized datasets that contain different itemset characteristics. This paper explores the effects that two dataset characteristics can…
In order to generate synthetic basket data sets for better benchmark testing, it is important to integrate characteristics from real-life databases into the synthetic basket data sets. The characteristics that could be used for this purpose include the frequent itemsets and association rules. The problem of generating synthetic basket data sets from frequent itemsets is generally referred to as inverse frequent itemset mining. In this paper, we show that the problem of approximate inverse frequent itemset mining is {\bf NP}-complete. Then we propose and analyze an approximate algorithm for app…
Here, we present a novel algorithm for frequent itemset mining for streaming data (FIM-SD). For the past decade, various FIM-SD methods in one-pass approximation settings have been developed to approximate the frequency of each itemset. These approaches can be categorized into two approximation types: parameter-constrained (PC) mining and resource-constrained (RC) mining. PC methods control the maximum error that can be included in the frequency based on a pre-defined parameter. In contrast, RC methods limit the maximum memory consumption based on resource constraints. However, the existing PC…
Jinan University（暨南大学）；Guangdong University of Technology（广东工业大学）
Traditional high-utility itemset mining (HUIM) aims to determine all high-utility itemsets (HUIs) that satisfy the minimum utility threshold (\textit{minUtil}) in transaction databases. However, in most applications, not all HUIs are interesting because only specific parts are required. Thus, targeted mining based on user preferences is more important than traditional mining tasks. This paper is the first to propose a target-based HUIM problem and to provide a clear formulation of the targeted utility mining task in a quantitative transaction database. A tree-based algorithm known as Target-ba…
The Apriori algorithm is a classical algorithm for the frequent itemset mining problem. A significant bottleneck in Apriori is the number of I/O operation involved, and the number of candidates it generates. We investigate the role of LSH techniques to overcome these problems, without adding much computational overhead. We propose randomized variations of Apriori that are based on asymmetric LSH defined over Hamming distance and Jaccard similarity.
The discovery of frequent itemsets can serve valuable economic and research purposes. Releasing discovered frequent itemsets, however, presents privacy challenges. In this paper, we study the problem of how to perform frequent itemset mining on transaction databases while satisfying differential privacy. We propose an approach, called PrivBasis, which leverages a novel notion called basis sets. A theta-basis set has the property that any itemset with frequency higher than theta is a subset of some basis. We introduce algorithms for privately constructing a basis set and then using it to find t…
Efficient discovery of frequent itemsets in large datasets is a crucial task of data mining. In recent years, several approaches have been proposed for generating high utility patterns, they arise the problems of producing a large number of candidate itemsets for high utility itemsets and probably degrades mining performance in terms of speed and space. Recently proposed compact tree structure, viz., UP Tree, maintains the information of transactions and itemsets, facilitate the mining performance and avoid scanning original database repeatedly. In this paper, UP Tree (Utility Pattern Tree) is…
There are many algorithms developed for improvement the time of mining frequent itemsets (FI) or frequent closed itemsets (FCI). However, the algorithms which deal with the time of generating association rules were not put in deep research. In reality, in case of a database containing many FI/FCI (from ten thousands up to millions), the time of generating association rules is much larger than that of mining FI/FCI. Therefore, this paper presents an application of frequent closed itemsets lattice (FCIL) for mining minimal non-redundant association rules (MNAR) to reduce a lot of time for genera…
Utility mining emerged to overcome the limitations of frequent itemset mining by considering the utility of an item. Utility of an item is based on user's interest or preference. Recently, temporal data mining has become a core technical data processing technique to deal with changing data. On-shelf utility mining considers on-shelf time period of item and gets the accurate utility values of itemsets in temporal database. In traditional on-shelf utility mining, profits of all items in databases are considered as positive values. However, in real applications, some items may have negative profi…
In general frequent itemsets are generated from large data sets by applying association rule mining algorithms like Apriori, Partition, Pincer-Search, Incremental, Border algorithm etc., which take too much computer time to compute all the frequent itemsets. By using Genetic Algorithm (GA) we can improve the scenario. The major advantage of using GA in the discovery of frequent itemsets is that they perform global search and its time complexity is less compared to other algorithms as the genetic algorithm is based on the greedy approach. The main aim of this paper is to find all the frequent i…
One of the biggest problems in itemset mining is the requirement of developing a data structure or algorithm, every time a user wants to extract a different type of itemsets. To overcome this, we propose a method, called Generic Itemset Mining based on Reinforcement Learning (GIM-RL), that offers a unified framework to train an agent for extracting any type of itemsets. In GIM-RL, the environment formulates iterative steps of extracting a target type of itemsets from a dataset. At each step, an agent performs an action to add or remove an item to or from the current itemset, and then obtains f…
Mining frequent itemsets from a transaction database has emerged as a fundamental problem in data mining and committed itself as a building block for many pattern mining tasks. In this paper, we present a general technique to reduce support checking time in existing depth-first search generate-and-test schemes such as Eclat/dEclat and PrePost+. Our technique allows infrequent candidate itemsets to be detected early. The technique is based on an early-stopping criterion and is general enough to be applicable in many frequent itemset mining algorithms. We have applied the technique to two TID-li…
This paper presents a study of the characteristics of transactional databases used in frequent itemset mining. Such characterizations have typically been used to benchmark and understand the data mining algorithms working on these databases. The aim of our study is to give a picture of how diverse and representative these benchmarking databases are, both in general but also in the context of particular empirical studies found in the literature. Our proposed list of metrics contains many of the existing metrics found in the literature, as well as new ones. Our study shows that our list of metri…
Traditional association rule mining based on the support-confidence framework provides the objective measure of the rules that are of interest to users. However, it does not reflect the utility of the rules. To extract non-redundant association rules in support-confidence framework frequent closed itemsets and their generators play an important role. To extract non-redundant association rules among high utility itemsets, high utility closed itemsets (HUCI) and their generators should be extracted in order to apply traditional support-confidence framework. However, no efficient method exists at…
A novel fast algorithm for finding quasi identifiers in large datasets is presented. Performance measurements on a broad range of datasets demonstrate substantial reductions in run-time relative to the state of the art and the scalability of the algorithm to realistically-sized datasets up to several million records.
Finding frequent itemsets in a data source is a fundamental operation behind Association Rule Mining. Generally, many algorithms use either the bottom-up or top-down approaches for finding these frequent itemsets. When the length of frequent itemsets to be found is large, the traditional algorithms find all the frequent itemsets from 1-length to n-length, which is a difficult process. This problem can be solved by mining only the Maximal Frequent Itemsets (MFS). Maximal Frequent Itemsets are frequent itemsets which have no proper frequent superset. Thus, the generation of only maximal frequent…
Data mining is a widely used technology for various real-life applications of data analytics and is important to discover valuable association rules in transaction databases. Interesting itemset mining plays an important role in many real-life applications, such as market, e-commerce, finance, and medical treatment. To date, various data mining algorithms based on frequent patterns have been widely studied, but there are a few algorithms that focus on mining infrequent or rare patterns. In some cases, infrequent or rare itemsets and rare association rules also play an important role in real-li…
Frequent Pattern Mining is a one field of the most significant topics in data mining. In recent years, many algorithms have been proposed for mining frequent itemsets. A new algorithm has been presented for mining frequent itemsets based on N-list data structure called Prepost algorithm. The Prepost algorithm is enhanced by implementing compact PPC-tree with the general tree. Prepost algorithm can only find a frequent itemsets with required (pre-order and post-order) for each node. In this chapter, we improved prepost algorithm based on Hadoop platform (HPrepost), proposed using the Mapreduce …
Finding high-importance patterns in data is an emerging data mining task known as High-utility itemset mining (HUIM). Given a minimum utility threshold, a HUIM algorithm extracts all the high-utility itemsets (HUIs) whose utility values are not less than the threshold. This can reveal a wealth of useful information, but the precise needs of users are not well taken into account. In particular, users often want to focus on patterns that have some specific items rather than find all patterns. To overcome that difficulty, targeted mining has emerged, focusing on user preferences, but only prelimi…
School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews（圣安德鲁斯大学计算机学院）；Vrije Universiteit Brussel（布鲁塞尔自由大学）
Finding interesting patterns is a challenging task in data mining. Constraint based mining is a well-known approach to this, and one for which constraint programming has been shown to be a well-suited and generic framework. Dominance programming has been proposed as an extension that can capture an even wider class of constraint-based mining problems, by allowing to compare relations between patterns. In this paper, in addition to specifying a dominance relation, we introduce the ability to specify an incomparability condition. Using these two concepts we devise a generic framework that can do…
Because of usefulness and comprehensibility, fuzzy data mining has been extensively studied and is an emerging topic in recent years. Compared with utility-driven itemset mining technologies, fuzzy utility mining not only takes utilities (e.g., profits) into account, but also considers quantities of items in each transaction for discovering high fuzzy utility itemsets (HFUIs). Thus, fuzziness can be regard as a key criterion to select high-utility itemsets, while the exiting algorithms are not efficient enough. In this paper, an efficient one-phase algorithm named Fuzzy-driven Utility Itemset …
In recent years, due to the wide applications of uncertain data, mining frequent itemsets over uncertain databases has attracted much attention. In uncertain databases, the support of an itemset is a random variable instead of a fixed occurrence counting of this itemset. Thus, unlike the corresponding problem in deterministic databases where the frequent itemset has a unique definition, the frequent itemset under uncertain environments has two different definitions so far. The first definition, referred as the expected support-based frequent itemset, employs the expectation of the support of a…
Czech Technical University in Prague（布拉格捷克技术大学）；Institute of Computer Science（计算机科学研究所）
In the recent decade companies started collecting of large amount of data. Without a proper analyse, the data are usually useless. The field of analysing the data is called data mining. Unfortunately, the amount of data is quite large: the data do not fit into main memory and the processing time can become quite huge. Therefore, we need parallel data mining algorithms. One of the popular and important data mining algorithm is the algorithm for generation of so called frequent itemsets. The problem of mining of frequent itemsets can be explained on the following example: customers goes in a sto…
Association rules express implication formed relations among attributes in databases of itemsets. The apriori algorithm is presented, the basis for most association rule mining algorithms. It works by pruning away rules that need not be evaluated based on the user specified minimum support confidence. Additionally, variations of the algorithm are presented that enable it to handle quantitative attributes and to extract rules about generalizations of items, but preserve the downward closure property that enables pruning. Intertransformation of the extensions is proposed for special cases.
The development of novel platforms and techniques for emerging "Big Data" applications requires the availability of real-life datasets for data-driven experiments, which are however out of reach for academic research in most cases as they are typically proprietary. A possible solution is to use synthesized datasets that reflect patterns of real ones in order to ensure high quality experimental findings. A first step in this direction is to use inverse mining techniques such as inverse frequent itemset mining (IFM) that consists of generating a transactional database satisfying given support co…
Frequent itemset mining in uncertain transaction databases semantically and computationally differs from traditional techniques applied on standard (certain) transaction databases. Uncertain transaction databases consist of sets of existentially uncertain items. The uncertainty of items in transactions makes traditional techniques inapplicable. In this paper, we tackle the problem of finding probabilistic frequent itemsets based on possible world semantics. In this context, an itemset X is called frequent if the probability that X occurs in at least minSup transactions is above a given thresho…
We study the problem of frequent itemset mining in domains where data is not recorded in a conventional database but only exists in human knowledge. We provide examples of such scenarios, and present a crowdsourcing model for them. The model uses the crowd as an oracle to find out whether an itemset is frequent or not, and relies on a known taxonomy of the item domain to guide the search for frequent itemsets. In the spirit of data mining with oracles, we analyze the complexity of this problem in terms of (i) crowd complexity, that measures the number of crowd questions required to identify th…
Jinan University（暨南大学）；Guangdong University of Technology（广东工业大学）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）
For applied intelligence, utility-driven pattern discovery algorithms can identify insightful and useful patterns in databases. However, in these techniques for pattern discovery, the number of patterns can be huge, and the user is often only interested in a few of those patterns. Hence, targeted high-utility itemset mining has emerged as a key research topic, where the aim is to find a subset of patterns that meet a targeted pattern constraint instead of all patterns. This is a challenging task because efficiently finding tailored patterns in a very large search space requires a targeted mini…
As advances in technology allow for the collection, storage, and analysis of vast amounts of data, the task of screening and assessing the significance of discovered patterns is becoming a major challenge in data mining applications. In this work, we address significance in the context of frequent itemset mining. Specifically, we develop a novel methodology to identify a meaningful support threshold s* for a dataset, such that the number of itemsets with support at least s* represents a substantial deviation from what would be expected in a random dataset with the same number of transactions a…
Quantum Computing and Data Processing for Frequent Itemset Mining
National Taiwan University（台湾大学）；National Chengchi University（国立政治大学）；Academia Sinica（中央研究院）；The Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）；University of Illinois Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）
The monotone duality problem is defined as follows: Given two monotone formulas f and g in iredundant DNF, decide whether f and g are dual. This problem is the same as duality testing for hypergraphs, that is, checking whether a hypergraph H consists of precisely all minimal transversals of a simple hypergraph G. By exploiting a recent problem-decomposition method by Boros and Makino (ICALP 2009), we show that duality testing for hypergraphs, and thus for monotone DNFs, is feasible in DSPACE[log^2 n], i.e., in quadratic logspace. As the monotone duality problem is equivalent to a number of pro…
Data aggregation in the setting of local differential privacy (LDP) guarantees strong privacy by providing plausible deniability of sensitive data. Existing works on this issue mostly focused on discovering heavy hitters, leaving the task of frequent itemset mining (FIM) as an open problem. To the best of our knowledge, the-state-of-the-art LDP solution to FIM is the SVSM protocol proposed recently. The SVSM protocol is mainly based on the padding and sampling based frequency oracle (PSFO) protocol, and regarded an itemset as an independent item without considering the frequency consistency am…
A target-oriented sequential pattern is a sequential pattern with a concerned itemset in the end of pattern. A time-interval sequential pattern is a sequential pattern with time-intervals between every pair of successive itemsets. In this paper we present an algorithm to discover target-oriented sequential pattern with time-intervals. To this end, the original sequences are reversed so that the last itemsets can be arranged in front of the sequences. The contrasts between reversed sequences and the concerned itemset are then used to exclude the irrelevant sequences. Clustering analysis is used…
Data mining is the practice to search large amount of data to discover data patterns. Data mining uses mathematical algorithms to group the data and evaluate the future events. Association rule is a research area in the field of knowledge discovery. Many data mining researchers had improved upon the quality of association rule for business development by incorporating influential factors like utility, number of items sold and for the mining of association data patterns. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm to find maximal frequent itemset first. Most of the association rule algorit…
Association rules is a very important part of data mining. It is used to find the interesting patterns from transaction databases. Apriori algorithm is one of the most classical algorithms of association rules, but it has the bottleneck in efficiency. In this article, we proposed a prefixed-itemset-based data structure for candidate itemset generation, with the help of the structure we managed to improve the efficiency of the classical Apriori algorithm.
