Incrementally mining high utility patterns based on pre-large concept

In traditional association rule mining, most algorithms are designed to discover frequent itemsets from a binary database. Utility mining was thus proposed to measure the utility values of purchased items for revealing high utility itemsets from a quantitative database. In the past, a two-phase high utility mining algorithm was thus proposed for efficiently discovering high utility itemsets from a quantitative database. In dynamic data mining, transactions may be inserted, deleted, or modified from a database. In this case, a batch mining procedure must rescan the whole updated database to maintain the up-to-date information. Designing an efficient approach for handling dynamic databases is thus a critical research issue in utility mining. In this paper, an incremental mining algorithm is proposed for efficiently maintaining discovered high utility itemsets based on pre-large concepts. Itemsets are first partitioned into three parts according to whether they have large (high), pre-large, or small transaction-weighted utilization in the original database and in inserted transactions. Individual procedures are then executed for each part. Experimental results show that the proposed incremental high utility mining algorithm outperforms existing algorithms.     

Efficient updating of discovered high-utility itemsets for transaction deletion in dynamic databases

Most algorithms related to association rule mining are designed to discover frequent itemsets from a binary database. Other factors such as profit, cost, or quantity are not concerned in binary databases. Utility mining was thus proposed to measure the utility values of purchased items for finding high-utility itemsets from a static database. In real-world applications, transactions are changed whether insertion or deletion in a dynamic database. An existing maintenance approach for handling high-utility itemsets in dynamic databases with transaction deletion must rescan the database when necessary. In this paper, an efficient algorithm, called PRE-HUI-DEL, for updating high-utility itemsets based on the pre-large concept for transaction deletion is proposed. The pre-large concept is used to partition transaction-weighted utilization itemsets into three sets with nine cases according to whether they have large (high), pre-large, or small transaction-weighted utilization in the original database and in the deleted transactions. Specific procedures are then applied to each case for maintaining and updating the discovered high-utility itemsets. Experimental results show that the proposed PRE-HUI-DEL algorithm outperforms a batch two-phase algorithm and a FUP2-based algorithm in maintaining high-utility itemsets.     

Fuzzy utility mining with upper-bound measure

Fuzzy utility mining has been an emerging research issue because of its simplicity and comprehensibility. Different from traditional fuzzy data mining, fuzzy utility mining considers not only quantities of items in transactions but also their profits for deriving high fuzzy utility itemsets. In this paper, we introduce a new fuzzy utility measure with the fuzzy minimum operator to evaluate the fuzzy utilities of itemsets. Besides, an effective fuzzy utility upper-bound model based on the proposed measure is designed to provide the downward-closure property in fuzzy sets, thus reducing the search space of finding high fuzzy utility itemsets. A two-phase fuzzy utility mining algorithm, named TPFU, is also proposed and described for solving the problem of fuzzy utility mining. At last, the experimental results on both synthetic and real datasets show that the proposed algorithm has good performance.     

Incrementally fast updated frequent pattern trees

The frequent-pattern-tree (FP-tree) is an efficient data structure for association-rule mining without generation of candidate itemsets. It was used to compress a database into a tree structure which stored only large items. It, however, needed to process all transactions in a batch way. In real-world applications, new transactions are usually inserted into databases. In this paper, we thus attempt to modify the FP-tree construction algorithm for efficiently handling new transactions. A fast updated FP-tree (FUFP-tree) structure is proposed, which makes the tree update process become easier. An incremental FUFP-tree maintenance algorithm is also proposed for reducing the execution time in reconstructing the tree when new transactions are inserted. Experimental results also show that the proposed FUFP-tree maintenance algorithm runs faster than the batch FP-tree construction algorithm for handling new transactions and generates nearly the same tree structure as the FP-tree algorithm. The proposed approach can thus achieve a good trade-off between execution time and tree complexity.     

On-shelf utility mining with negative item values

On-shelf utility mining has recently received interest in the data mining field due to its practical considerations. On-shelf utility mining considers not only profits and quantities of items in transactions but also their on-shelf time periods in stores. Profit values of items in traditional on-shelf utility mining are considered as being positive. However, in real-world applications, items may be associated with negative profit values. This paper proposes an efficient three-scan mining approach to efficiently find high on-shelf utility itemsets with negative profit values from temporal databases. In particular, an effective itemset generation method is developed to avoid generating a large number of redundant candidates and to effectively reduce the number of data scans in mining. Experimental results for several synthetic and real datasets show that the proposed approach has good performance in pruning effectiveness and execution efficiency.     

Updating high-utility pattern trees with transaction modification

Traditional association-rule mining only concerns the occurrence frequencies of the items in a binary database. In real-world applications, customers may buy several copies of the purchased items. Other factors such as profit, quantity, or price should be concerned to measure the utilities of the purchased items. High-utility itemsets mining was thus proposed to consider the factors of quantity and profit. Two-phase model was the most commonly way to keep the transaction-weighted utilization downward closure property, thus reducing the numerous candidates in utility mining. Most methods for finding high-utility itemsets are used to handle a static database. In practical applications, transactions are changed whether insertion, deletion, or modification. Some itemsets may arise as the new high-utility itemsets or become invalid knowledge in the updated database. In this paper, a maintenance Fast Updated High Utility Pattern tree for transaction MODification (FUP-HUP-tree-MOD) algorithm is thus proposed to effective maintain and update the built HUP tree for mining high-utility itemsets in dynamic databases without candidate generation. Experiments are conducted to show better performance of the proposed algorithm compared to the two-phase algorithm and the HUP tree algorithm in batch mode.     

An efficient projection-based indexing approach for mining high utility itemsets

Recently, utility mining has widely been discussed in the field of data mining. It finds high utility itemsets by considering both profits and quantities of items in transactional data sets. However, most of the existing approaches are based on the principle of levelwise processing, as in the traditional two-phase utility mining algorithm to find a high utility itemsets. In this paper, we propose an efficient utility mining approach that adopts an indexing mechanism to speed up the execution and reduce the memory requirement in the mining process. The indexing mechanism can imitate the traditional projection algorithms to achieve the aim of projecting sub-databases for mining. In addition, a pruning strategy is also applied to reduce the number of unpromising itemsets in mining. Finally, the experimental results on synthetic data sets and on a real data set show the superior performance of the proposed approach.     

The Pre-FUFP algorithm for incremental mining

The frequent pattern tree (FP-tree) is an efficient data structure for association-rule mining without generation of candidate itemsets. It was used to compress a database into a tree structure which stored only large items. It, however, needed to process all transactions in a batch way. In real-world applications, new transactions are usually incrementally inserted into databases. In the past, we proposed a Fast Updated FP-tree (FUFP-tree) structure to efficiently handle new transactions and to make the tree update process become easier. In this paper, we attempt to modify the FUFP-tree construction based on the concept of pre-large itemsets. Pre-large itemsets are defined by a lower support threshold and an upper support threshold. It does not need to rescan the original database until a number of new transactions have been inserted. The proposed approach can thus achieve a good execution time for tree construction especially when each time a small number of transactions are inserted. Experimental results also show that the proposed Pre-FUFP maintenance algorithm has a good performance for incrementally handling new transactions.     

A new mining approach for uncertain databases using CUFP trees

In the past, many algorithms have been proposed to mine frequent itemsets from transactional databases, in which the presence or absence of items in transactions was certainly known. In some applications, items may also be uncertain in transactions with their existential probabilities ranging from 0 to 1 in the uncertain dataset. Apparently, the processing in uncertain datasets is quite different from those in certain datasets. The UF-tree algorithm was proposed to construct the UF-tree structure from an uncertain dataset and mine frequent itemsets from the tree. In the UF-tree construction process, however, only the same items with the same existential probabilities in transactions were merged together in the tree, thus causing many redundant nodes in the tree. In this paper, a new tree structure called the compressed uncertain frequent-pattern tree (CUFP tree) is designed to efficiently keep the related information in the mining process. In the CUFP tree, the same items will be merged in a branch of the tree even when the existential probabilities in transactions are not the same. A mining algorithm called the CUFP-mine algorithm is then proposed based on the tree structure to find uncertain frequent patterns. Experimental results show that the proposed approach has a better performance than UF-tree algorithm both in the execution time and in the number of tree nodes.     

Maintaining the discovered high-utility itemsets with transaction modification

Most approaches for discovering frequent itemsets derive association rules from a binary database. Profit, cost, and quantity are not considered in traditional association-rule mining. Utility mining was proposed to measure the utilities of purchase products to derive highutility itemsets (HUIs). Many algorithms have been proposed to efficiently find HUIs from a static database. In real-world applications, transactions are inserted, deleted, or modified in dynamic situations. Existing batch approaches have to re-process the updated database since previously discovered HUIs are not maintained. In this paper, a Fast UPdated (FUP) strategy with utility measure and a maintenance algorithm, called FUP-HUI-MOD, are developed to efficiently maintain and update discovered HUIs. When transactions are modified, the proposed algorithm partitions the transactions before and after the modification into two parts, creating four cases. Each case is maintained using a specific procedure to update the discovered HUIs. Based on the designed FUP-HUI-MOD algorithm, the original database is not required to be rescanned each time compared to the state-of-the-art high-utility itemset mining algorithms in batch mode. Experiments are conducted to show that the proposed algorithm outperforms batch algorithms in maintaining HUIs.     

Mining itemset utilities from transaction databases

The rationale behind mining frequent itemsets is that only itemsets with high frequency are of interest to users. However, the practical usefulness of frequent itemsets is limited by the significance of the discovered itemsets. A frequent itemset only reflects the statistical correlation between items, and it does not reflect the semantic significance of the items. In this paper, we propose a utility based itemset mining approach to overcome this limitation. The proposed approach permits users to quantify their preferences concerning the usefulness of itemsets using utility values. The usefulness of an itemset is characterized as a utility constraint. That is, an itemset is interesting to the user only if it satisfies a given utility constraint. We show that the pruning strategies used in previous itemset mining approaches cannot be applied to utility constraints. In response, we identify several mathematical properties of utility constraints. Then, two novel pruning strategies are designed. Two algorithms for utility based itemset mining are developed by incorporating these pruning strategies. The algorithms are evaluated by applying them to synthetic and real world databases. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithms are effective on the databases tested.     

基于模式增长的高效用序列模式挖掘算法

高效用序列模式挖掘是数据挖掘领域的一项重要内容,在生物信息学、消费行为分析等方面具有重要的应用.与传统基于频繁项模式挖掘方法不同,高效用序列模式挖掘不仅考虑项集的内外效用,更突出项集的时间序列含义,计算复杂度较高.尽管已经有一定数量的算法被提出应用于解决该类问题,挖掘算法的时空效率依然成为该领域的主要研究热点问题.鉴于...     

Maintenance of fast updated frequent pattern trees for record deletion

The Frequent-Pattern-tree (FP tree) is an efficient data structure for association-rule mining without generation of candidate itemsets. It was used to represent a database into a tree structure which stored only frequent items. It, however, needed to process all transactions in a batch way. In the past, Hong et al. thus proposed an efficient incremental mining algorithm for handling newly inserted transactions. In addition to record insertion, record deletion from databases is also commonly seen in real-applications. In this paper, we thus attempt to modify the FP-tree construction algorithm for efficiently handling deletion of records. A fast updated FP-tree (FUFP-tree) structure is used, which makes the tree update process become easier. An FUFP-tree maintenance algorithm for the deletion of records is also proposed for reducing the execution time in reconstructing the tree when records are deleted. Experimental results also show that the proposed FUFP-tree maintenance algorithm for deletion of records runs faster than the batch FP-tree construction algorithm for handling deleted records and generates nearly the same tree structure as the FP-tree algorithm. The proposed approach can thus achieve a good trade-off between execution time and tree complexity.     

High utility itemset mining with techniques for reducing overestimated utilities and pruning candidates

High utility itemset mining considers the importance of items such as profit and item quantities in transactions. Recently, mining high utility itemsets has emerged as one of the most significant research issues due to a huge range of real world applications such as retail market data analysis and stock market prediction. Although many relevant algorithms have been proposed in recent years, they incur the problem of generating a large number of candidate itemsets, which degrade mining performance. In this paper, we propose an algorithm named MU-Growth (Maximum Utility Growth) with two techniques for pruning candidates effectively in mining process. Moreover, we suggest a tree structure, named MIQ-Tree (Maximum Item Quantity Tree), which captures database information with a single-pass. The proposed data structure is restructured for reducing overestimated utilities. Performance evaluation shows that MU-Growth not only decreases the number of candidates but also outperforms state-of-the-art tree-based algorithms with overestimated methods in terms of runtime with a similar memory usage.     

Actionable high-coherent-utility fuzzy itemset mining

Many fuzzy data mining approaches have been proposed for finding fuzzy association rules with the predefined minimum support from quantitative transaction databases. Since each item has its own utility, utility itemset mining has become increasingly important. However, common problems with existing approaches are that an appropriate minimum support is difficult to determine and that the derived rules usually expose common-sense knowledge, which may not be interesting from a business point of view. This study thus proposes an algorithm for mining high-coherent-utility fuzzy itemsets to overcome problems with the properties of propositional logic. Quantitative transactions are first transformed into fuzzy sets. Then, the utility of each fuzzy itemset is calculated according to the given external utility table. If the value is larger than or equal to the minimum utility ratio, the itemset is considered as a high-utility fuzzy itemset. Finally, contingency tables are calculated and used for checking whether a high-utility fuzzy itemset satisfies four criteria. If so, it is a high-coherent-utility fuzzy itemset. Experiments on the foodmart and simulated datasets are made to show that the derived itemsets by the proposed algorithm not only can reach better profit than selling them separately, but also can provide fewer but more useful utility itemsets for decision-makers.     

动态数据库中增量Top-k高效用模式挖掘算法

高效用模式的挖掘需要设定一个合适的阈值,而阈值设定对用户来说并非易事,阈值过小导致产生大量低效用模式,阈值过大可能导致无高效用模式生成。因而Top-k高效用模式挖掘方法被提出,k指效用值前k大的模式。并且大量的高效用挖掘研究仅针对静态数据库,但在实际应用中常常会遇到新事务的加入的情况。针对以上问题,提出了增量的Top-k高效用挖掘算法TOPK-HUP-INS。算法通过四个有效的策略,在增量数据的情况下,有效地挖掘用户所需数量的高效用模式。通过在不同数据集上的对比实验表明TOPK-HUP-INS算法在时空性能上表现优异。     

Effective utility mining with the measure of average utility

Frequent-itemset mining only considers the frequency of occurrence of the items but does not reflect any other factors, such as price or profit. Utility mining is an extension of frequent-itemset mining, considering cost, profit or other measures from user preference. Traditionally, the utility of an itemset is the summation of the utilities of the itemset in all the transactions regardless of its length. The average utility measure is thus adopted in this paper to reveal a better utility effect of combining several items than the original utility measure. It is defined as the total utility of an itemset divided by its number of items within it. The average-utility itemsets, as well as the original utility itemsets, does not have the “downward-closure” property. A mining algorithm is then proposed to efficiently find the high average-utility itemsets. It uses the summation of the maximal utility among the items in each transaction with the target itemset as the upper bound to overestimate the actual average utilities of the itemset and processes it in two phases. As expected, the mined high average-utility itemsets in the proposed way will be fewer than the high utility itemsets under the same threshold. The proposed approach can thus be executed under a larger threshold than the original, thus with a more significant and relevant criterion. Experimental results also show the performance of the proposed algorithm.     

EDUA: An efficient algorithm for dynamic database mining

Maintaining frequent itemsets (patterns) is one of the most important issues faced by the data mining community. While many algorithms for pattern discovery have been developed, relatively little work has been reported on mining dynamic databases, a major area of application in this field. In this paper, a new algorithm, namely the Efficient Dynamic Database Updating Algorithm (EDUA), is designed for mining dynamic databases. It works well when data deletion is carried out in any subset of a database that is partitioned according to the arrival time of the data. A pruning technique is proposed for improving the efficiency of the EDUA algorithm. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the proposed approach and it is demonstrated that the EDUA is efficient.     

Mining Maximal High Utility Itemsets on Dynamic Profit Databases

Abstract

To overcome the limitation of high-utility itemset mining, more compact, lossless, and concise representations of high utility itemsets (HUIs) have been proposed in previous works, such as closed HUIs (CHUIs) or maximal HUIs (MHUIs). Focusing into MHUI mining, in this article, we present efficient approaches to directly mine MHUIs from transactional databases without generating any candidates. The proposed algorithms, which all execute in one phase, utilize many efficient data structures and pruning techniques such as EUCP combined with EUCS, CUIP combined with FUCS, and the P-set structure to significantly reduce the search space and remove nonpromising itemsets, thus, increase the performance of the MHUI mining process. Furthermore, while previous works assumed that the unit profit of items is fixed, which is not practical in many real-world applications, our work resolved this issue by applying a new utility calculation into the mining process to reflect the true nature of real-world databases, thus, generating more accurate results.     

一种挖掘加权频繁项集的改进算法

分析了New-Apriori和MWFI（Mining Weighted Frequent Itemsets）算法之不足,提出了一种挖掘加权频繁项集的New-MWFI算法。该算法按属性的权值对事务进行分类,并依次求出每个类别内的加权频繁项集。由于每个类别内的频繁项集满足Apriori性质,因而可以利用Apriori算法或其他改进算法进行挖掘,从而克服了原来算法的不合理和效率低下的缺陷。实验表明该算法能更有效地从数据集中挖掘出加权频繁项集。