On Efficiency of Dataset Filtering Implementations in Constraint-Based Discovery of Frequen.pdfVIP

On Efficiency of Dataset Filtering Implementations in Constraint-Based Discovery of Frequent Itemsets Marek WOJCIECHOWSKI, Maciej ZAKRZEWICZ Poznan University of Technology, Institute of Computing Science, ul. Piotrowo 3a, 60-965 Poznan, Poland {marek,mzakrz}@cs.put.poznan.pl Abstract. Discovery of frequent itemsets is one of the fundamental data mining problems. Typically, the goal is to discover all the itemsets whose support in the source dataset exceeds a user-specified threshold. However, very often users want to restrict the set of frequent itemsets to be discovered by adding extra constraints on size and contents of the itemsets. Many constraint-based frequent itemset discovery techniques have been proposed recently. One of the techniques, called dataset filtering, is based on the observation that for some classes of constraints, itemsets satisfying them can only be supported by transactions that satisfy the same constraints. Conceptually, dataset filtering transforms a given data mining task into an equivalent one operating on a smaller dataset. In this paper we discuss possible implementations of dataset filtering, evaluating their strengths and weaknesses. 1. Introduction Discovery of frequent itemsets is one of the fundamental data mining problems. Informally, frequent itemsets are subsets frequently occurring in a collection of sets of items. Discovery of frequent itemsets is a key step in association rule mining [1] but the itemsets themselves also provide useful information on the correlations between items in the database. Typically, the goal is to discover all the itemsets whose support in the source dataset exceeds a user- specified threshold. The most popular algorithm performing the above task is Apriori introduced in [3]. Apriori reduces the search space by exploiting the following property: an itemset cannot be frequent if any of its subsets is not frequent. The algorithm iteratively generates can