Distributed Mining of Maximal Frequent Itemsets on a Data Grid System

In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, named Grid-based Distributed Max-Miner (GridDMM), for mining maximal frequent itemsets from databases on a Data Grid. A frequent itemset is maximal if none of its supersets is frequent. GridDMM is specifically suitable for use in Grid environments due to low communication and synchronization overhead. GridDMM consists of a local mining phase and a global mining phase. During the local mining phase, each node mines the local database to discover the local maximal frequent itemsets, then they form a set of maximal candidate itemsets for the top-down search in the subsequent global mining phase. A new prefix-tree data structure is developed to facilitate the storage and counting of the global candidate itemsets of different sizes. We built a Data Grid system on a cluster of workstations using the open-source Globus Toolkit, and evaluated the GridDMM algorithm in terms of performance, scalability, and the overhead of communication and synchronization. GridDMM demonstrates better performance than other sequential and parallel algorithms, and its performance is scalable in terms of the database size and the number of nodes. This research was supported in part by LexisNexis, NCR and AFRL/Wright Brothers Institute (WBI).     

MAFIA: a maximal frequent itemset algorithm

We present a new algorithm for mining maximal frequent itemsets from a transactional database. The search strategy of the algorithm integrates a depth-first traversal of the itemset lattice with effective pruning mechanisms that significantly improve mining performance. Our implementation for support counting combines a vertical bitmap representation of the data with an efficient bitmap compression scheme. In a thorough experimental analysis, we isolate the effects of individual components of MAFIA including search space pruning techniques and adaptive compression. We also compare our performance with previous work by running tests on very different types of data sets. Our experiments show that MAFIA performs best when mining long itemsets and outperforms other algorithms on dense data by a factor of three to 30.     

Meta itemset: a new concise representation of frequent itemset

The sheer size of all frequent itemsets is one challenging problem in data mining research. Based on both closed itemset and maximal itemset, meta itemset which is a new concise representation of frequent itemset is proposed. It is proved that both closed itemset and maximal itemset are special cases of meta itemset. The set of all closed itemsets and the set of all maximal itemsets form the upper bound and the lower bound of the set of all meta itemsets. Then, property and pruning strategies of meta itemset are discussed. Finally, an efficient algorithm for mining meta itemset is proposed. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is effective and efficient.     

Efficient mining of maximal frequent itemsets from databases on a cluster of workstations

In this paper, we propose two parallel algorithms for mining maximal frequent itemsets from databases. A frequent itemset is maximal if none of its supersets is frequent. One parallel algorithm is named distributed max-miner (DMM), and it requires very low communication and synchronization overhead in distributed computing systems. DMM has the local mining phase and the global mining phase. During the local mining phase, each node mines the local database to discover the local maximal frequent itemsets, then they form a set of maximal candidate itemsets for the top-down search in the subsequent global mining phase. A new prefix tree data structure is developed to facilitate the storage and counting of the global candidate itemsets of different sizes. This global mining phase using the prefix tree can work with any local mining algorithm. Another parallel algorithm, named parallel max-miner (PMM), is a parallel version of the sequential max-miner algorithm (Proc of ACM SIGMOD Int Conf on Management of Data, 1998, pp 85–93). Most of existing mining algorithms discover the frequent k-itemsets on the kth pass over the databases, and then generate the candidate (k + 1)-itemsets for the next pass. Compared to those level-wise algorithms, PMM looks ahead at each pass and prunes more candidate itemsets by checking the frequencies of their supersets. Both DMM and PMM were implemented on a cluster of workstations, and their performance was evaluated for various cases. They demonstrate very good performance and scalability even when there are large maximal frequent itemsets (i.e., long patterns) in databases.

Parallel mining of maximal sequential patterns using multiple samples

In this paper, we propose a new parallel algorithm, named PMSPX, which mines maximal frequent sequences by using multiple samples to exclude infrequent candidates effectively. A frequent sequence is maximal if none of its supersequences is frequent. Unlike the traditional single-sample methods developed for mining frequent itemsets, PMSPX uses multiple samples. Thus, it can avoid or alleviate some problems inherent in the single-sample methods. We theoretically analyzed how to increase the minimum support level to prevent misestimating infrequent candidates as frequent in the mining of samples. PMSPX is a parallel version of our sequential MSPX algorithm, and it is developed on a cluster of workstations. In PMSPX, each processing node uses MSPX to find a candidate set of local maximal frequent sequences first, independently from other processing nodes. Then, a top-down search is performed, starting with all the candidates, in a synchronous manner to identify real maximal frequent sequences. This asynchronous local mining followed by synchronous global mining approach minimizes the synchronization and communication among the processing nodes. Three database partitioning methods are proposed to distribute the database across the processing nodes, so that their workloads are balanced and the data skewness of the whole database is preserved in the data partition of each node. A comprehensive analysis was performed on PMSPX and existing parallel sequence mining algorithms, and extensive experiments were conducted on PMSPX. PMSPX demonstrates very good speedup and scaleup properties. It also requires less communication and synchronization than other parallel algorithms.     

基于二进制的频繁项集挖掘新算法

频繁项集挖掘是数据挖掘中的一个经典的问题。然而,大部分算法需要扫描数据库多次,算法效率比较低。该文提出了一个效率比较好的挖掘频繁项集的新算法,在这个算法中,所有的事务都是以二进制的形式表示,所以挖掘极大频繁项集的任务就变成了从二进制集中发现频繁模式。而且,这种算法只需要扫描原始数据库一次。最后,利用试验来证明这种算法的效率和优势。     

On efficiently summarizing categorical databases

Frequent itemset mining was initially proposed and has been studied extensively in the context of association rule mining. In recent years, several studies have also extended its application to transaction or document clustering. However, most of the frequent itemset based clustering algorithms need to first mine a large intermediate set of frequent itemsets in order to identify a subset of the most promising ones that can be used for clustering. In this paper, we study how to directly find a subset of high quality frequent itemsets that can be used as a concise summary of the transaction database and to cluster the categorical data. By exploring key properties of the subset of itemsets that we are interested in, we proposed several search space pruning methods and designed an efficient algorithm called SUMMARY. Our empirical results show that SUMMARY runs very fast even when the minimum support is extremely low and scales very well with respect to the database size, and surprisingly, as a pure frequent itemset mining algorithm it is very effective in clustering the categorical data and summarizing the dense transaction databases. Jianyong Wang received the Ph.D. degree in computer science in 1999 from the Institute of Computing Technology, the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Since then, he ever worked as an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Peking (Beijing) University in the areas of distributed systems and Web search engines, and visited the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University, the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Digital Technology Center and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Minnesota, mainly working in the area of data mining. He is currently an associate professor of the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Tsinghua University, P.R. China. George Karypis received his Ph.D. degree in computer science at the University of Minnesota and he is currently an associate professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota. His research interests spans the areas of parallel algorithm design, data mining, bioinformatics, information retrieval, applications of parallel processing in scientific computing and optimization, sparse matrix computations, parallel preconditioners, and parallel programming languages and libraries. His research has resulted in the development of software libraries for serial and parallel graph partitioning (METIS and ParMETIS), hypergraph partitioning (hMETIS), for parallel Cholesky factorization (PSPASES), for collaborative filtering-based recommendation algorithms (SUGGEST), clustering high dimensional datasets (CLUTO), and finding frequent patterns in diverse datasets (PAFI). He has coauthored over ninety journal and conference papers on these topics and a book title “Introduction to Parallel Computing” (Publ. Addison Wesley, 2003, 2nd edition). In addition, he is serving on the program committees of many conferences and workshops on these topics and is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.     

基于B-list的最大频繁项集挖掘算法

针对现有的最大频繁项集挖掘算法挖掘时间过长、内存消耗较大的问题,提出了一种基于构造链表B-list的最大频繁项集挖掘算法BMFI,该算法利用B-list数据结构来挖掘频繁项集并采用全序搜索树作为搜索空间,然后采用父等价剪枝技术来缩小搜索空间,最后再结合基于MFI-tree的投影策略实现超集检测来提高算法的效率。实验结果表明,BMFI算法在时间效率与空间效率方面均优于FPMAX算法与MFIN算法。该算法在稠密数据集与稀疏数据集中进行最大频繁项集挖掘时均有良好的效果。     

Mining top-k regular-frequent itemsets using database partitioning and support estimation

Temporal regularity of itemset appearance can be regarded as an important criterion for measuring the interestingness of itemsets in several applications. A frequent itemset can be said to be regular-frequent in a database if it appears at a regular period. Therefore, the problem of mining a complete set of regular-frequent itemsets requires the specification of a support and a regularity threshold. However, in practice, it is often difficult for users to provide an appropriate support threshold. In addition, the use of a support threshold tends to produce a large number of regular-frequent itemsets and it might be better to ask for the number of desired results. We thus propose an efficient algorithm for mining top-k regular-frequent itemsets without setting a support threshold. Based on database partitioning and support estimation techniques, the proposed algorithm also uses a best-first search strategy with only one database scan. We then compare our algorithm with the state-of-the-art algorithms for mining top-k regular-frequent itemsets. Our experimental studies on both synthetic and real data show that our proposal achieves high performance for small and large values of k.     

基于二进制的频繁项集挖掘新算法

频繁项集挖掘是数据挖掘中的一个经典的问题。然而,大部分算法需要扫描数据库多次,算法效率比较低。该文提出了一个效率比较好的挖掘频繁项集的新算法,在这个算法中,所有的事务都是以二进制的形式表示,所以挖掘极大频繁项集的任务就变成了从二进制集中发现频繁模式。而且,这种算法只需要扫描原始数据库一次。最后,利用试验来证明这种算法的效率和优势。     

Scalable algorithms for association mining

Association rule discovery has emerged as an important problem in knowledge discovery and data mining. The association mining task consists of identifying the frequent itemsets, and then forming conditional implication rules among them. We present efficient algorithms for the discovery of frequent itemsets which forms the compute intensive phase of the task. The algorithms utilize the structural properties of frequent itemsets to facilitate fast discovery. The items are organized into a subset lattice search space, which is decomposed into small independent chunks or sublattices, which can be solved in memory. Efficient lattice traversal techniques are presented which quickly identify all the long frequent itemsets and their subsets if required. We also present the effect of using different database layout schemes combined with the proposed decomposition and traversal techniques. We experimentally compare the new algorithms against the previous approaches, obtaining improvements of more than an order of magnitude for our test databases     

最大频繁项目集的快速更新

挖掘最大频繁项目集是多种数据挖掘应用中的关键问题．为克服基于Apriori的最大频繁项目集挖掘算法存在的不足,DMFIA采用FP-tree存储结构及自顶向下的搜索策略,有效地提高了最大频繁项目集的挖掘效率．但对于频繁项目多而最大频繁项目集维数相对较小的情况,DMFIA要经过多层搜索且在每一层产生大量的候选项目集,因而影响算法的执行效率．为此,该文提出了DMFIA的改进算法IDMFIA(the Improved algorithm of DMFIA)．IDMFIA采用自顶向下和自底向上双向搜索策略,可尽早修剪掉较短最大频繁项目集的超集和较长最大频繁项目集的子集．另外,该文还提出最大频繁项目集更新算法FUMFIA(Fast Updating Maximum Frequent Itemsets Algorithm),该算法充分利用已建立的FP-tree和已挖掘的最大频繁项目集,可对已挖掘的最大频繁项目集进行高效维护．实验结果表明,IDMFIA和FUMFIA可有效提高最大频繁项目集的挖掘和更新效率．     

频繁项集挖掘的研究进展及主流方法

关联分析作为数据挖掘的主要研究模块之一,主要用于发现隐藏在大型数据集中的强关联特征。而多数关联规则挖掘任务可分为频繁模式(频繁项集、频繁序列、频繁子图)的产生和规则的产生。前者发现数据集中满足最小支持度阈值的项集、序列与子图;后者从上一步发现的频繁模式中提取高置信度的规则。频繁项集挖掘是许多数据挖掘任务中的关键问题,也是关联规则挖掘算法的核心。十几年来,学者们致力于提高频繁项集的生成效率,从不同的角度进行改进以提高算法效率,大量的高效可伸缩性算法被提出。文中对频繁项集挖掘进行深入分析,对完全频繁项集、闭频繁项集、极大频繁项集的典型算法进行介绍和评述,最后对频繁项集挖掘算法的研究方向进行简要分析。     

一种新的最大频繁项目集挖掘算法

最大频繁项目集挖掘是数据挖掘领域最重要的基本问题之一,在分析已有算法的基础上,提出了一种新的挖掘最大频繁项目集的算法,实验表明该算法在性能上优于已有的同类算法。     

一种结合散列与位表挖掘频繁项目集算法

在频繁项集的挖掘中,很多算法都是基于Apriori的。这些算法有两个共同的问题:一是把整个数据库装入内存,占用大量的空间;二是在产生候选项集和计算支持度时花费了大量的时间。为了提高效率,提出了一种基于位表挖掘频繁项目集的算法Hash-BFI。按照水平和垂直的方向把数据库压缩到位表内,以大大节省内存空间。引入散列函数计算频繁二项集,完全通过AND, OR运算得到候选项集和计算候选项集支持度,并进行剪枝,从而提高了算法效率。     

快速挖掘频繁项集的并行算法

传统的挖掘频繁项集的并行算法存在数据偏移、通信量大、同步次数较多和扫描数据库次数较多等问题。针对这些问题,提出了一种快速挖掘频繁项集的并行算法(FPMFI)。FPMFI算法让各计算机节点独立地计算局部频繁项集,然后与中心节点交互实现数据汇总,最终获得全局频繁项集。理论分析和实验结果表明FPMFI算法是有效的。     

Fast and memory efficient mining of frequent closed itemsets

This paper presents a new scalable algorithm for discovering closed frequent itemsets, a lossless and condensed representation of all the frequent itemsets that can be mined from a transactional database. Our algorithm exploits a divide-and-conquer approach and a bitwise vertical representation of the database and adopts a particular visit and partitioning strategy of the search space based on an original theoretical framework, which formalizes the problem of closed itemsets mining in detail. The algorithm adopts several optimizations aimed to save both space and time in computing itemset closures and their supports. In particular, since one of the main problems in this type of algorithms is the multiple generation of the same closed itemset, we propose a new effective and memory-efficient pruning technique, which, unlike other previous proposals, does not require the whole set of closed patterns mined so far to be kept in the main memory. This technique also permits each visited partition of the search space to be mined independently in any order and, thus, also in parallel. The tests conducted on many publicly available data sets show that our algorithm is scalable and outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms like CLOSET+ and FP-CLOSE, in some cases by more than one order of magnitude. More importantly, the performance improvements become more and more significant as the support threshold is decreased.     

基于频繁项目集链式存储方法的关联规则算法

为了提高经典关联规则Apriori算法的挖掘效率,针对Apriori算法的瓶颈问题,提出了一种链式结构存储频繁项目集并生成最大频繁项目集的关联规则算法.该算法采用比特向量方式存储事务,生成频繁项目集的同时,把包含此频繁项目的事务作为链表连接到频繁项目之后,生成最大频繁项目集.该算法能够减小扫描事物数据库的次数和生成候选项目集的数量,从而减少了生成最大频繁项目集的时间,实验结果表明,该算法提高了运算效率.     

网格下最大频繁项集挖掘算法的实现

随着网格和数据挖掘技术的发展,提出了网格平台下最大频繁项集数据挖掘算法,采用数据库的垂直表示和基于前缀关系的等价划分,以等价类长度的指数函数作为等价类的权值,减少剪枝对负载的影响,合理划分等价类,在动态负载平衡情况下使处理机异步计算,大大提高算法的执行效率。实验证明设计的算法有较好的可扩展性,其性能明显优于其他相关算法。     

CFP-tree: A compact disk-based structure for storing and querying frequent itemsets

Frequent itemset mining is an important problem in the data mining area with a wide range of applications. Many decision support systems need to support online interactive frequent itemset mining, which is a challenging task because frequent itemset mining is a computation intensive repetitive process. One solution is to precompute frequent itemsets. In this paper, we propose a compact disk-based data structure—CFP-tree to store precomputed frequent itemsets on a disk to support online mining requests. The CFP-tree structure effectively utilizes the redundancy in frequent itemsets to save space. The compressing ratio of a CFP-tree can be as high as several thousands or even higher. Efficient algorithms for retrieving frequent itemsets from a CFP-tree, as well as efficient algorithms to construct and maintain a CFP-tree, are developed. Our performance study demonstrates that with a CFP-tree, frequent itemset mining requests can be responded to promptly.