Top-k high average-utility itemsets mining with effective pruning strategies

High average-utility itemset (HAUI) mining has recently received interest in the data mining field due to its balanced utility measurement, which considers not only profits and quantities of items but also the lengths of itemsets. Although several algorithms have been designed for the task of HAUI mining in recent years, it is hard for users to determine an appropriate minimum average-utility threshold for the algorithms to work efficiently and control the mining result precisely. In this paper, we address this issue by introducing a framework of top-k HAUI mining, where \(k\) is the desired number of high average-utility itemsets to be mined instead of setting a minimum average-utility threshold. An efficient list based algorithm named TKAU is proposed to mine the top-k high average-utility itemsets in a single phase. TKAU introduces two novel strategies, named EMUP and EA to avoid performing costly join operations for calculating the utilities of itemsets. Moreover, three strategies named RIU, CAD, and EPBF are also incorporated to raise its internal minimal average-utility threshold effectively, and thus reduce the search space. Extensive experiments on both real and synthetic datasets show that the proposed algorithm has excellent performance and scalability.     

An efficient algorithm for mining top-<Emphasis Type="Italic">k</Emphasis> on-shelf high utility itemsets

High on-shelf utility itemset (HOU) mining is an emerging data mining task which consists of discovering sets of items generating a high profit in transaction databases. The task of HOU mining is more difficult than traditional high utility itemset (HUI) mining, because it also considers the shelf time of items, and items having negative unit profits. HOU mining can be used to discover more useful and interesting patterns in real-life applications than traditional HUI mining. Several algorithms have been proposed for this task. However, a major drawback of these algorithms is that it is difficult for users to find a suitable value for the minimum utility threshold parameter. If the threshold is set too high, not enough patterns are found. And if the threshold is set too low, too many patterns will be found and the algorithm may use an excessive amount of time and memory. To address this issue, we propose to address the problem of top-k on-shelf high utility itemset mining, where the user directly specifies k, the desired number of patterns to be output instead of specifying a minimum utility threshold value. An efficient algorithm named KOSHU (fast top-K on-shelf high utility itemset miner) is proposed to mine the top-k HOUs efficiently, while considering on-shelf time periods of items, and items having positive and/or negative unit profits. KOSHU introduces three novel strategies, named efficient estimated co-occurrence maximum period rate pruning, period utility pruning and concurrence existing of a pair 2-itemset pruning to reduce the search space. KOSHU also incorporates several novel optimizations and a faster method for constructing utility-lists. An extensive performance study on real-life and synthetic datasets shows that the proposed algorithm is efficient both in terms of runtime and memory consumption and has excellent scalability.     

Mining top-k frequent patterns with combination reducing techniques

Top-k frequent pattern mining finds interesting patterns from the highest support to the k-th support. The approach can be effectively applied in numerous fields such as marketing, finance, bio-data analysis, and so on since it does not need constraints by a minimum support threshold. Top-k mining methods use the support of the k-th pattern, not a user-specified minimum support. Thus, the methods conduct mining operations based on very low supports until the k-th pattern is detected. When a low support is used in the mining process, single-paths with numerous items are generated, where the top-k mining algorithm extracts valid patterns by combining the items for each single-path. Therefore, the bigger the number of combinations is, the larger the increase in time and memory consumption is. In this paper, in order to mine top-k frequent patterns more efficiently, we consider converting patterns obtained from single-paths into composite patterns during the mining process and recovering them as the original patterns when the top-k frequent patterns are extracted. For this, we define a new concept, the composite pattern, and propose novel techniques for reducing pattern combinations in the single-path. Two algorithms are introduced in this paper, where the former is CRM (Combination Reducing method), applying our reduction manner, and the latter is CRMN (Combination Reducing method for N-itemset), considering N-itemset, i.e., patterns’ lengths. A performance evaluation shows that CRM and CRMN algorithms can efficiently reduce pattern combinations in single-paths compared to state-of-the-art algorithms. The experimental results also illustrate that our approaches have outstanding performance in terms of runtime, memory, and scalability.     

High utility pattern mining over data streams with sliding window technique

Processing changeable data streams in real time is one of the most important issues in the data mining field due to its broad applications such as retail market analysis, wireless sensor networks, and stock market prediction. In addition, it is an interesting and challenging problem to deal with the stream data since not only the data have unbounded, continuous, and high speed characteristics but also their environments have limited resources. High utility pattern mining, meanwhile, is one of the essential research topics in pattern mining to overcome major drawbacks of the traditional framework for frequent pattern mining that takes only binary databases and identical item importance into consideration. This approach conducts mining processes by reflecting characteristics of real world databases, non-binary quantities and relative importance of items. Although relevant algorithms were proposed for finding high utility patterns in stream environments, they suffer from a level-wise candidate generation-and-test and a large number of candidates by their overestimation techniques. As a result, they consume a huge amount of execution time, which is a significant performance issue since a rapid process is necessary in stream data analysis. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for mining high utility patterns from resource-limited environments through efficient processing of data streams in order to solve the problems of the overestimation-based methods. To improve mining performance with fewer candidates and search space than the previous ones, we develop two techniques for reducing overestimated utilities. Moreover, we suggest a tree-based data structure to maintain information of stream data and high utility patterns. The proposed tree is restructured by our updating method with decreased overestimation utilities to keep up-to-date stream information whenever the current window slides. Our approach also has an important effect on expert and intelligent systems in that it can provide users with more meaningful information than traditional analysis methods by reflecting the characteristics of real world non-binary databases in stream environments and emphasizing on recent data. Comprehensive experimental results show that our algorithm outperforms the existing sliding window-based one in terms of runtime efficiency and scalability.     

k-近邻关系下的空间高效用核模式挖掘

空间数据挖掘旨在从空间数据库中发现和提取有价值的潜在知识.空间co-location(共存)模式挖掘一直以来都是空间数据挖掘领域的重要研究方向之一,其目的 是发现一组频繁邻近出现的空间特征子集,而空间高效用co-location模式挖掘则考虑了特征的效用属性.二者在度量空间实例的邻近关系时一般都需要预先给定一个距离阈值...     

HUC-Prune: an efficient candidate pruning technique to mine high utility patterns

Traditional frequent pattern mining methods consider an equal profit/weight for all items and only binary occurrences (0/1) of the items in transactions. High utility pattern mining becomes a very important research issue in data mining by considering the non-binary frequency values of items in transactions and different profit values for each item. However, most of the existing high utility pattern mining algorithms suffer in the level-wise candidate generation-and-test problem and generate too many candidate patterns. Moreover, they need several database scans which are directly dependent on the maximum candidate length. In this paper, we present a novel tree-based candidate pruning technique, called HUC-Prune (High Utility Candidates Prune), to solve these problems. Our technique uses a novel tree structure, called HUC-tree (High Utility Candidates tree), to capture important utility information of the candidate patterns. HUC-Prune avoids the level-wise candidate generation process by adopting a pattern growth approach. In contrast to the existing algorithms, its number of database scans is completely independent of the maximum candidate length. Extensive experimental results show that our algorithm is very efficient for high utility pattern mining and it outperforms the existing algorithms.     

多最小效用阈值的频繁高效用项集快速挖掘算法

针对多最小效用阈值高效用项集挖掘算法（MHUI）中出现的重复计算、挖掘的结果项集不是频繁的问题,提出两个新的快速挖掘算法FMHUI和SFMHUI。FMHUI算法在计算项集的最小效用阈值时利用前一次计算结果,避免了项之间的重复比较;另外定义了项的扩展项的最小效用阈值表EMMU-table快速计算出扩展项的最小效用阈值,提高了运行效率。SFMHUI算法在FMHUI的基础上增加了支持度约束,使挖掘的项集既是高效用的也是频繁的。通过仿真实验验证了所提出算法的高效性和可行性。     

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.     

FDHUP: Fast algorithm for mining discriminative high utility patterns

Recently, high utility pattern mining (HUPM) has been extensively studied. Many approaches for HUPM have been proposed in recent years, but most of them aim at mining HUPs without any consideration for their frequency. This has the major drawback that any combination of a low utility item with a very high utility pattern is regarded as a HUP, even if this combination has low affinity and contains items that rarely co-occur. Thus, frequency should be a key criterion to select HUPs. To address this issue, and derive high utility interesting patterns (HUIPs) with strong frequency affinity, the HUIPM algorithm was proposed. However, it recursively constructs a series of conditional trees to produce candidates and then derive the HUIPs. This procedure is time-consuming and may lead to a combinatorial explosion when the minimum utility threshold is set relatively low. In this paper, an efficient algorithm named fast algorithm for mining discriminative high utility patterns (DHUPs) with strong frequency affinity (FDHUP) is proposed to efficiently discover DHUPs by considering both the utility and frequency affinity constraints. Two compact structures named EI-table and FU-tree and three pruning strategies are introduced in the proposed algorithm to reduce the search space, and efficiently and effectively discover DHUPs. An extensive experimental study shows that the proposed FDHUP algorithm considerably outperforms the state-of-the-art HUIPM algorithm in terms of execution time, memory consumption, and scalability.     

带有间隔约束的多序列模式挖掘

研究这样一个问题：给定多序列、支持度阈值和间隔约束,从多序列中挖掘所有出现次数不小于支持度阈值的频繁序列模式,这里要求模式中任意两个相邻元素在序列中的出现都要满足用户自定义的间隔约束,并且模式在序列中的出现要满足one-off条件。在解决该问题上,已有算法M-OneOffMine在计算模式的支持度时,只考虑模式的每个字符在序列中的首次出现,导致计算的模式支持度远小于其真实支持度,以致许多频繁的模式没有被挖掘出来。为此,设计了一个有效的带有间隔约束的多序列模式挖掘算法--MMSP算法：首先,通过采用二维表保存模式的候选位置;然后,根据候选位置采用最左最优的思想选择匹配位置。通过生物DNA序列进行实验,多序列中元素序列数目不变而序列长度变化时,MMSP挖掘出的频繁模式总数是同类算法M-OneOffMine的3.23倍;在元素序列个数变化时,MMSP挖掘出的频繁模式个数平均是M-OneOffMine的4.11倍;这两种情况下MMSP都有更好的时间性能。在模式长度变化时,MMSP挖掘出的频繁模式个数分别平均是M-OneOffMine的2.21倍和MPP的5.24倍。同时还验证了M-OneOffMine挖掘到的模式是MMSP挖掘到的频繁的子集。实验结果表明,MMSP算法不仅可以挖掘到更多的频繁模式,而且时间花费更少,更适合于实际的应用。     

一种快速挖掘Top-k高效用模式的算法

高效用模式挖掘是数据挖掘领域的一个基础研究方向,其中关于top-k高效用模式的挖掘算法也越来越多,其中k指的是用户需要挖掘的高效用模式的个数。它们可以归纳为两类：二阶段top-k算法和一阶段top-k算法。两者的主要区别是,前者在挖掘的过程中会产生大量的候选模式,这个是影响算法性能的主要因素;后者在挖掘的过程中不产生候选模式。为了更加高效地挖掘效用值最高的k个模式,一阶段算法TKHUP被提出。该算法在进行数据挖掘的过程中主要是通过四个有效策略来减少时间和空间消耗的。通过大量的实验数据表明,TKHUP在时间性能上优于其它top-k高效用模式挖掘算法。     

基于动态交易项目集的关联规则更新

该文在交易数据库和最小支持度不变条件下,当用户动态地增加或删除交易项目集中的某些交易项目时,充分利用了交易项目集改变前已采掘出的频繁模式集,提出了两种关联规则的快速更新算法ｌｚｉ－ａｒ和Ｄｚｉ－ａｒ,经实验分析表明,该地关联规则的更 可行的和高效的。     

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.鉴于此, 本文提出一个基于模式增长的高效用序列模式挖掘算法HUSP-FP.依据高效用序列项集必须满足事务效用闭包属性要求, 算法首先在去除无用项后建立全局树, 进而采用模式增长方法从全局树上获取全部高效用序列模式, 避免产生候选项集. 在实验环节与目前效率较好的HUSP-Miner、USPAN、HUS-Span三类算法进行了时空计算对比, 实验结果表明本文给出算法在较小阈值下仍能有效挖掘到相关序列模式, 并且在计算时间和空间使用效率两方面取得了较大的提高.     

A novel approach for mining cyclically repeated patterns with multiple minimum supports

Periodic patterns and cyclic patterns have been used to discover recurring patterns in sequence databases. Toroslu (2003) proposed cyclically repeated pattern (CRP) mining, in which a new parameter called repetition support is considered in the mining process. In a data sequence, the occurrence of a subsequence must satisfy a single user-specified minimum repetition support. However, in real-life applications, items may occur at various frequencies in a database. The rare item problem may occur when all items are set to a single minimum repetition support. To solve this problem, we included the concept of multiple minimum supports to enable users to specify the multiple minimum item repetition support (MIR) according to the natures of items. In this paper, we first redefined CRPs based on the MIR and original form of the sequence minimum support. A new algorithm, rep-PrefixSpan, was developed for discovering a complete set of CRPs in sequence databases. The experimental results indicate that the proposed approach exhibits performance superior to that of conventional CRP mining. The proposed method can be applied in many application domains including customer purchase behavior, web logging, and stock analyses.     

High-utility and diverse itemset mining

High-utility Itemset Mining (HUIM) finds patterns from a transaction database with their utility no less than a user-defined threshold. The utility of an itemset is defined as the sum of the utilities of its items. The utility notion enables a data analyst to associate a profit score with each item and thereof to a pattern. We extend the notion of high-utility with diversity to define a new pattern type called High-utility and Diverse pattern (HUD). The notion of diversity of a pattern captures the extent of the different categories covered by the selected items in the pattern. An application of diverse-pattern lies in the recommendation task where a system can recommend to a customer a set of items from a new class based on her previously bought items. Our notion of diversity is easy to compute and also captures the basic essence of a previously proposed diversity notion. The existing algorithm to compute frequent-diverse patterns is 2-phase, i.e., in the first phase, frequent patterns are computed, out of which diverse patterns are filtered out in the second phase. We, in this paper, give an integrated algorithm that efficiently computes high-utility and diverse patterns in a single phase. Our experimental study shows that our proposed algorithm is very efficient as compared to a 2-phase algorithm that extracts high-utility itemsets in the first phase and filters out the diverse itemsets in the second phase.

     

基于灰色关联分析的孤立点挖掘算法

孤立点挖掘是数据挖掘的重要研究方向之一,其目标是发现数据集中不具备数据一般特性的数据对象。传统孤立点挖掘算法通常基于项集属性,不适用于多目标决策和综合评价。该文提出一种基于灰色关联分析的孤立点检测算法OMGRA,通过总评价判断数挖掘孤立点集,避免人工确定阈值。实例分析表明,该算法能有效检测数据集中的孤立点,挖掘出的孤立点符合实际情况。     

基于最大值约束的模糊关联规则挖掘

数据挖掘是从数据库中发现潜在有用知识或者感兴趣模式的过程。在数据挖掘领域中主要集中于单一支持度下的关联规则挖掘,在事务数据库中发现项目之间的关联性,而在实际应用中,项目可以有不同的最小支持度,不同的项目可能具有不同的标准去判断其重要性,因此提出一个在最大值支持度约束下,发现有用的模糊关联规则挖掘算法,在该约束下,利用逐层搜索的迭代方法发现频繁项目集,通过实例证明了该挖掘算法是易于理解和有意义的,具有很好的效率。     

Efficient Adaptive-Support Association Rule Mining for Recommender Systems

Collaborative recommender systems allow personalization for e-commerce by exploiting similarities and dissimilarities among customers' preferences. We investigate the use of association rule mining as an underlying technology for collaborative recommender systems. Association rules have been used with success in other domains. However, most currently existing association rule mining algorithms were designed with market basket analysis in mind. Such algorithms are inefficient for collaborative recommendation because they mine many rules that are not relevant to a given user. Also, it is necessary to specify the minimum support of the mined rules in advance, often leading to either too many or too few rules; this negatively impacts the performance of the overall system. We describe a collaborative recommendation technique based on a new algorithm specifically designed to mine association rules for this purpose. Our algorithm does not require the minimum support to be specified in advance. Rather, a target range is given for the number of rules, and the algorithm adjusts the minimum support for each user in order to obtain a ruleset whose size is in the desired range. Rules are mined for a specific target user, reducing the time required for the mining process. We employ associations between users as well as associations between items in making recommendations. Experimental evaluation of a system based on our algorithm reveals performance that is significantly better than that of traditional correlation-based approaches.     

快速统一挖掘超团模式和极大超团模式

超团模式是一种新型的关联模式,这种模式所包含的项目相互间具有很高的亲密度.超团模式中某个项目在事务中的出现很强地暗示了模式中其他项目也会相应地出现.极大超团模式是一组超团模式更加紧凑的表示,可被用于多种应用.挖掘这两种模式的标准算法是完全不同的.提出一种基于FP-tree(frequent pattern tree)的快速挖掘算法——混合超团模式增长(hybrid hyperclique pattern growth,简称HHCP-growth),统一了两种模式的挖掘.算法采用递归挖掘方法,并应用多种有效的剪枝策略.提出并证明几个相关命题来说明剪枝策略的有效性和算法的正确性.实验结果表明,HHCP-growth算法相对于标准的超团模式挖掘算法和极大超团模式挖掘算法都具有更高的效率,尤其对于大数据集或在低支持度条件下更为显著.     

含正负项目的基于位串频繁项集挖掘算法研究

对频繁模式树中的每个节点引入一个位串存储前缀路径,提出了包含正负项目的频繁模式树的构造方法,它不需要反复遍历节点就可获得包含正负项目的频繁项集．与直接使用ＦＰｇｒｏｗｔｈ算法相比,无需对原始数据库进行负项目的扩展,也不用再构造并销毁额外的数据结构,只需在原始的频繁模式树上修改,因而在时空开销上都具有一定的优势．实验表明,所提出的算法比现有的同类挖掘算法和直接ＦＰｇｒｏｗｔｈ算法具有更好的效率．