An incremental mining algorithm for high utility itemsets

Association-rule mining, which is based on frequency values of items, is the most common topic in data mining. In real-world applications, customers may, however, buy many copies of products and each product may have different factors, such as profits and prices. Only mining frequent itemsets in binary databases is thus not suitable for some applications. Utility mining is thus presented to consider additional measures, such as profits or costs according to user preference. In the past, a two-phase mining algorithm was designed for fast discovering high utility itemsets from databases. When data come intermittently, the approach needs to process all the transactions in a batch way. In this paper, an incremental mining algorithm for efficiently mining high utility itemsets is proposed to handle the above situation. It is based on the concept of the fast-update (FUP) approach, which was originally designed for association mining. The proposed approach first partitions itemsets into four parts according to whether they are high transaction-weighted utilization itemsets in the original database and in the newly inserted transactions. Each part is then executed by its own procedure. Experimental results also show that the proposed algorithm executes faster than the two-phase batch mining algorithm in the intermittent data environment