Abstract

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Abstract

The output of boolean association rule mining algorithms is often too large for manual examination. For dense datasets, it is often impractical to even generate all frequent itemsets. The closed itemset approach handles this information overload by pruning “uninteresting” rules following the observation that most rules can be derived from other rules. In this paper, we propose a new framework, namely, the generalized closed (or g-closed) itemset framework. By allowing for a small tolerance in the accuracy of itemset supports, we show that the number of such redundant rules is far more than what was previously estimated. Our scheme can be integrated into both levelwise algorithms (Apriori) and two-pass algorithms (ARMOR). We evaluate its performance by measuring the reduction in output size as well as in response time. Our experiments show that incorporating gclosed itemsets provides significan

Abstract

The output of boolean association rule mining algorithms is often too large for manual examination. For dense datasets, it is often impractical to even generate all frequent itemsets. The closed itemset approach handles this information overload by pruning “uninteresting” rules following the observation that most rules can be derived from other rules. In this paper, we propose a new framework, namely, the generalized closed (or
-closed) itemset framework. By allowing for a small tolerance in the accuracy of itemset supports, we show that the number of such redundant rules is far more than what was previously estimated. Our scheme can be integrated into both levelwise algorithms (Apriori) and two-pass algorithms (ARMOR). We evaluate its performance by measuring the reduction in output size as well as in response time. Our experiments show that incorporating g-closed itemsets provides significant performance improvements on a variety of databases.

Abstract

In this paper, we first focus our attention on the question of how much space remains for performance improvement over current association rule mining algorithms. Our strategy is to compare their performance against an “Oracle algorithm” that knows in advance the identities of all frequent itemsets in the database and only needs to gather their actual supports to complete the mining process. Our experimental results show that current mining algorithms do not perform uniformly well with respect to the Oracle for all database characteristics and support thresholds. In many cases there is a substantial gap between the Oracle’s performance and that of the current mining algorithms. Second, we present a new mining algorithm, called ARMOR, that is constructed by making minimal changes to the Oracle algorithm. ARMOR consistently performs within a factor of two of the Oracle on both real and synthetic datasets over practical ranges of support specifications.