关联规则在手机业务数据库中的应用

关联规则挖掘主要是指发现大量数据之间有趣的关联或相关联系．揭示数据间未知的依赖关系，根据这种依赖关系，可以从某一数据对象的信息来推断另一数据对象的信息。笔者将关联规则挖掘应用于目前市场潜力巨大的手机业务上，从外表看来杂乱无章的数据中，提取出某些业务间的内在关系，成功揭示了手机业务中存在的依赖关系，为移动运营商向客户推荐相关业务（交叉销售）时提供了参考。     

Flexible online association rule mining based on multidimensional pattern relations

Most incremental mining and online mining algorithms concentrate on finding association rules or patterns consistent with entire current sets of data. Users cannot easily obtain results from only interesting portion of data. This may prevent the usage of mining from online decision support for multidimensional data. To provide ad-hoc, query-driven, and online mining support, we first propose a relation called the multidimensional pattern relation to structurally and systematically store context and mining information for later analysis. Each tuple in the relation comes from an inserted dataset in the database. We then develop an online mining approach called three-phase online association rule mining (TOARM) based on this proposed multidimensional pattern relation to support online generation of association rules under multidimensional considerations. The TOARM approach consists of three phases during which final sets of patterns satisfying various mining requests are found. It first selects and integrates related mining information in the multidimensional pattern relation, and then if necessary, re-processes itemsets without sufficient information against the underlying datasets. Some implementation considerations for the algorithm are also stated in detail. Experiments on homogeneous and heterogeneous datasets were made and the results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.     

Novel parallel method for association rule mining on multi-core shared memory systems

Association rule mining (ARM) is an important task in data mining with many practical applications. Current methods for association rule mining have shown unstable performance for different database types and under-utilize the benefits of multi-core shared memory machines. In this paper, we address these issues by presenting a novel parallel method for finding frequent patterns, the most computational intensive phase of ARM. Our proposed method, named ShaFEM, combines two mining strategies and applies the most appropriate one to each data subset of the database to efficiently adapt to the data characteristics and run fast on both sparse and dense databases. In addition, our newlock-free design minimizes the synchronization needs and maximizes the data independence to enhance the scalability. The new structure lends itself well to dynamic job scheduling resulting in a well-balanced load on the new multi-core shared memory architectures. We have evaluated ShaFEM on 12-core multi-socket servers and found that our method run up to 5.8 times faster and consumes memory up to 7.1 times less than the state-of-the-art parallel method. For some test cases, ShaFEM can save up to 4.9 days of execution time over the compared method.     

Toward boosting distributed association rule mining by data de-clustering

Existing parallel algorithms for association rule mining have a large inter-site communication cost or require a large amount of space to maintain the local support counts of a large number of candidate sets. This study proposes a de-clustering approach for distributed architectures, which eliminates the inter-site communication cost, for most of the influential association rule mining algorithms. To de-cluster the database into similar partitions, an efficient algorithm is developed to approximate the shortest spanning path (SSP) to link transaction data together. The SSP obtained is then used to evenly de-cluster the transaction data into subgroups. The proposed approach guarantees that all subgroups are similar to each other and to the original group. Experiment results show that data size and the number of items are the only two factors that determine the performance of de-clustering. Additionally, based on the approach, most of the influential association rule mining algorithms can be implemented in a distributed architecture to obtain a drastic increase in speed without losing any frequent itemsets. Furthermore, the data distribution in each de-clustered participant is almost the same as that of a single site, which implies that the proposed approach can be regarded as a sampling method for distributed association rule mining. Finally, the experiment results prove that the original inadequate mining results can be improved to an almost perfect level.     

Data quality awareness: a case study for cost optimal association rule mining

The quality of discovered association rules is commonly evaluated by interestingness measures (commonly support and confidence) with the purpose of supplying indicators to the user in the understanding and use of the new discovered knowledge. Low-quality datasets have a very bad impact over the quality of the discovered association rules, and one might legitimately wonder if a so-called “interesting” rule noted LHS→ RHS is meaningful when 30% of the LHS data are not up-to-date anymore, 20% of the RHS data are not accurate, and 15% of the LHS data come from a data source that is well-known for its bad credibility. This paper presents an overview of data quality characterization and management techniques that can be advantageously employed for improving the quality awareness of the knowledge discovery and data mining processes. We propose to integrate data quality indicators for quality aware association rule mining. We propose a cost-based probabilistic model for selecting legitimately interesting rules. Experiments on the challenging KDD-Cup-98 datasets show that variations on data quality have a great impact on the cost and quality of discovered association rules and confirm our approach for the integrated management of data quality indicators into the KDD process that ensure the quality of data mining results.     

Preserving privacy in association rule mining with bloom filters

Privacy preserving association rule mining has been an active research area since recently. To this problem, there have been two different approaches—perturbation based and secure multiparty computation based. One drawback of the perturbation based approach is that it cannot always fully preserve individual’s privacy while achieving precision of mining results. The secure multiparty computation based approach works only for distributed environment and needs sophisticated protocols, which constrains its practical usage. In this paper, we propose a new approach for preserving privacy in association rule mining. The main idea is to use keyed Bloom filters to represent transactions as well as data items. The proposed approach can fully preserve privacy while maintaining the precision of mining results. The tradeoff between mining precision and storage requirement is investigated. We also propose δ-folding technique to further reduce the storage requirement without sacrificing mining precision and running time.     

时态关联规则挖掘方法的研究

利用时态关联规则的分析,可以得到一系列相关性的项目集合,从而为决策提供更加有利的帮助和支持。在研究了传统的静态关联规则的基础上,提出了一种以交易规模的变化率为处理对象,即考虑各类项目交易量的变动状况的时态关联规则的表述与挖掘方法,并对其表述形式及算法实现进行了探讨。     

Optimizing frequent time-window selection for association rules mining in a temporal database using a variable neighbourhood search

In this study, we investigate the problem of maximum frequent time-window selection (MFTWS) that appears in the process of discovering association rules time-windows (ARTW). We formulate the problem as a mathematical model using integer programming that is a typical combination problem with a solution space exponentially related to the problem size. A variable neighbourhood search (VNS) algorithm is developed to solve the problem with near-optimal solutions. Computational experiments are performed to test the VNS algorithm against a benchmark problem set. The results show that the VNS algorithm is an effective approach for solving the MTFWS problem, capable of discovering many large-one frequent itemset with time-windows (FITW) with a larger time-coverage rate than the lower bounds, thus laying a good foundation for mining ARTW.     

A data mining approach to database compression

Data mining can dig out valuable information from databases to assist a business in approaching knowledge discovery and improving business intelligence. Database stores large structured data. The amount of data increases due to the advanced database technology and extensive use of information systems. Despite the price drop of storage devices, it is still important to develop efficient techniques for database compression. This paper develops a database compression method by eliminating redundant data, which often exist in transaction database. The proposed approach uses a data mining structure to extract association rules from a database. Redundant data will then be replaced by means of compression rules. A heuristic method is designed to resolve the conflicts of the compression rules. To prove its efficiency and effectiveness, the proposed approach is compared with two other database compression methods. Chin-Feng Lee is an associate professor with the Department of Information Management at Chaoyang University of Technology, Taiwan, R.O.C. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1994 and 1998, respectively, from the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering at National Chung Cheng University. Her current research interests include database design, image processing and data mining techniques. S. Wesley Changchien is a professor with the Institute of Electronic Commerce at National Chung-Hsing University, Taiwan, R.O.C. He received a BS degree in Mechanical Engineering (1989) and completed his MS (1993) and Ph.D. (1996) degrees in Industrial Engineering at State University of New York at Buffalo, USA. His current research interests include electronic commerce, internet/database marketing, knowledge management, data mining, and decision support systems. Jau-Ji Shen received his Ph.D. degree in Information Engineering and Computer Science from National Taiwan University at Taipei, Taiwan in 1988. From 1988 to 1994, he was the leader of the software group in Institute of Aeronautic, Chung-Sung Institute of Science and Technology. He is currently an associate professor of information management department in the National Chung Hsing University at Taichung. His research areas focus on the digital multimedia, database and information security. His current research areas focus on data engineering, database techniques and information security. Wei-Tse Wang received the B.A. (2001) and M.B.A (2003) degrees in Information Management at Chaoyang University of Technology, Taiwan, R.O.C. His research interests include data mining, XML, and database compression.     

Approximate mining of maximal frequent itemsets in data streams with different window models

A data stream is a massive, open-ended sequence of data elements continuously generated at a rapid rate. Mining data streams is more difficult than mining static databases because the huge, high-speed and continuous characteristics of streaming data. In this paper, we propose a new one-pass algorithm called DSM-MFI (stands for Data Stream Mining for Maximal Frequent Itemsets), which mines the set of all maximal frequent itemsets in landmark windows over data streams. A new summary data structure called summary frequent itemset forest (abbreviated as SFI-forest) is developed for incremental maintaining the essential information about maximal frequent itemsets embedded in the stream so far. Theoretical analysis and experimental studies show that the proposed algorithm is efficient and scalable for mining the set of all maximal frequent itemsets over the entire history of the data streams.     

Recognizing patterns in streams with imprecise timestamps

Large-scale event systems are becoming increasingly popular in a variety of domains. Event pattern evaluation plays a key role in monitoring applications in these domains. identifies matches of user-defined patterns on high-volume event streams. Existing work on pattern evaluation, however, assumes that the occurrence time of each event is known precisely and the events from various sources can be merged into a single stream with a total or partial order. We observe that in real-world applications event occurrence times are often unknown or imprecise. Therefore, we propose a temporal model that assigns a time interval to each event to represent all of its possible occurrence times and revisit pattern evaluation under this model. In particular, we propose the formal semantics of such pattern evaluation, two evaluation frameworks, and algorithms and optimizations in these frameworks. Our evaluation results using both real traces and synthetic systems show that the event-based framework always outperforms the point-based framework and with optimizations, it achieves high efficiency for a wide range of workloads tested.     

流式数据上关联规则挖掘研究综述*

当前许多工程领域产生大量高速实时的流式数据,基于流式数据的关联规则挖掘应用广泛,与传统的静态数据相比,流式数据上关联分析面临极大的资源挑战。提出了流式数据上关联规则的形式化定义和基本挖掘算法,系统地回顾了近年来流式数据上关联规则挖掘的研究进展,详细分析了目前挖掘算法研究中存在的主要问题和解决途径,阐述了未来的研究方向。     

关联规则中FP树算法的研究与改进

传统的基于关联规则的FP-树算法在挖掘频繁项目集算法中应用很广,它在数据挖掘过程中不需要产生候选集,但是该FP-树算法在挖掘较大型数据库时运行速度慢、占用内存大或根本无法构造基于内存的FP-树。为了解决这些问题,本文提出了一种占用内存少、能满足大型数据库挖掘需求的改进的FP树算法。     

A novel approach to adaptive relational association rule mining

The paper focuses on the adaptive relational association rule mining problem. Relational association rules represent a particular type of association rules which describe frequent relations that occur between the features characterizing the instances within a data set. We aim at re-mining an object set, previously mined, when the feature set characterizing the objects increases. An adaptive relational association rule method, based on the discovery of interesting relational association rules, is proposed. This method, called ARARM (Adaptive Relational Association Rule Mining) adapts the set of rules that was established by mining the data before the feature set changed, preserving the completeness. We aim to reach the result more efficiently than running the mining algorithm again from scratch on the feature-extended object set. Experiments testing the method's performance on several case studies are also reported. The obtained results highlight the efficiency of the ARARM method and confirm the potential of our proposal.     

面向数据流的频繁项集挖掘研究

针对数据流的特点,对数据流中频繁模式挖掘问题进行了研究,提出了数据流频繁项集挖掘算法FP-SegCount。该算法将数据流分段并利用改进的FP-growth算法挖掘分段中的频繁项集。然后,利用Count Min Sketch进行项集计数。算法解决了压缩统计和计算快速高效的问题。通过和FP-DS算法的实验对比,FP-SegCount算法具有较好的时间效率。     

面向数据流的频繁模式挖掘研究*

数据流的无限性、高速性使得经典的频繁模式挖掘方法难以适用到数据流中。针对数据流的特点,对数据流中频繁模式挖掘问题进行了研究,提出了数据流频繁模式挖掘算法FP-SegCount。该算法将数据流分段并利用改进的FP-growth算法挖掘分段中的频繁项集,然后利用Count-Min Sketch进行项集计数。算法解决了压缩统计和计算快速高效的问题。通过实验分析,FP-SegCount算法是有效的。     

DSM-FI: an efficient algorithm for mining frequent itemsets in data streams

Online mining of data streams is an important data mining problem with broad applications. However, it is also a difficult problem since the streaming data possess some inherent characteristics. In this paper, we propose a new single-pass algorithm, called DSM-FI (data stream mining for frequent itemsets), for online incremental mining of frequent itemsets over a continuous stream of online transactions. According to the proposed algorithm, each transaction of the stream is projected into a set of sub-transactions, and these sub-transactions are inserted into a new in-memory summary data structure, called SFI-forest (summary frequent itemset forest) for maintaining the set of all frequent itemsets embedded in the transaction data stream generated so far. Finally, the set of all frequent itemsets is determined from the current SFI-forest. Theoretical analysis and experimental studies show that the proposed DSM-FI algorithm uses stable memory, makes only one pass over an online transactional data stream, and outperforms the existing algorithms of one-pass mining of frequent itemsets.

A high-performance distributed algorithm for mining association rules

We present a new distributed association rule mining (D-ARM) algorithm that demonstrates superlinear speed-up with the number of computing nodes. The algorithm is the first D-ARM algorithm to perform a single scan over the database. As such, its performance is unmatched by any previous algorithm. Scale-up experiments over standard synthetic benchmarks demonstrate stable run time regardless of the number of computers. Theoretical analysis reveals a tighter bound on error probability than the one shown in the corresponding sequential algorithm. As a result of this tighter bound and by utilizing the combined memory of several computers, the algorithm generates far fewer candidates than comparable sequential algorithms—the same order of magnitude as the optimum.     

An adaptive ensemble classifier for mining concept drifting data streams

It is challenging to use traditional data mining techniques to deal with real-time data stream classifications. Existing mining classifiers need to be updated frequently to adapt to the changes in data streams. To address this issue, in this paper we propose an adaptive ensemble approach for classification and novel class detection in concept drifting data streams. The proposed approach uses traditional mining classifiers and updates the ensemble model automatically so that it represents the most recent concepts in data streams. For novel class detection we consider the idea that data points belonging to the same class should be closer to each other and should be far apart from the data points belonging to other classes. If a data point is well separated from the existing data clusters, it is identified as a novel class instance. We tested the performance of this proposed stream classification model against that of existing mining algorithms using real benchmark datasets from UCI (University of California, Irvine) machine learning repository. The experimental results prove that our approach shows great flexibility and robustness in novel class detection in concept drifting and outperforms traditional classification models in challenging real-life data stream applications.     

Capturing association among items in a database

Measuring association among variables is an important step for finding solutions to many data mining problems. An existing metric might not be effective to serve as a measure of association among a set of items in a database. In this paper, we propose two measures of association, A₁ and A₂. We introduce the notion of associative itemset in a database. We express the proposed measures in terms of supports of itemsets. In addition, we provide theoretical foundations of our work. We present experimental results on both real and synthetic databases to show the effectiveness of A₂.