8 research outputs found
Efficient Discovery of Association Rules and Frequent Itemsets through Sampling with Tight Performance Guarantees
The tasks of extracting (top-) Frequent Itemsets (FI's) and Association
Rules (AR's) are fundamental primitives in data mining and database
applications. Exact algorithms for these problems exist and are widely used,
but their running time is hindered by the need of scanning the entire dataset,
possibly multiple times. High quality approximations of FI's and AR's are
sufficient for most practical uses, and a number of recent works explored the
application of sampling for fast discovery of approximate solutions to the
problems. However, these works do not provide satisfactory performance
guarantees on the quality of the approximation, due to the difficulty of
bounding the probability of under- or over-sampling any one of an unknown
number of frequent itemsets. In this work we circumvent this issue by applying
the statistical concept of \emph{Vapnik-Chervonenkis (VC) dimension} to develop
a novel technique for providing tight bounds on the sample size that guarantees
approximation within user-specified parameters. Our technique applies both to
absolute and to relative approximations of (top-) FI's and AR's. The
resulting sample size is linearly dependent on the VC-dimension of a range
space associated with the dataset to be mined. The main theoretical
contribution of this work is a proof that the VC-dimension of this range space
is upper bounded by an easy-to-compute characteristic quantity of the dataset
which we call \emph{d-index}, and is the maximum integer such that the
dataset contains at least transactions of length at least such that no
one of them is a superset of or equal to another. We show that this bound is
strict for a large class of datasets.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures. A shorter version of this paper appeared in the
proceedings of ECML PKDD 201
Finding the True Frequent Itemsets
Frequent Itemsets (FIs) mining is a fundamental primitive in data mining. It
requires to identify all itemsets appearing in at least a fraction of
a transactional dataset . Often though, the ultimate goal of
mining is not an analysis of the dataset \emph{per se}, but the
understanding of the underlying process that generated it. Specifically, in
many applications is a collection of samples obtained from an
unknown probability distribution on transactions, and by extracting the
FIs in one attempts to infer itemsets that are frequently (i.e.,
with probability at least ) generated by , which we call the True
Frequent Itemsets (TFIs). Due to the inherently stochastic nature of the
generative process, the set of FIs is only a rough approximation of the set of
TFIs, as it often contains a huge number of \emph{false positives}, i.e.,
spurious itemsets that are not among the TFIs. In this work we design and
analyze an algorithm to identify a threshold such that the
collection of itemsets with frequency at least in
contains only TFIs with probability at least , for some
user-specified . Our method uses results from statistical learning
theory involving the (empirical) VC-dimension of the problem at hand. This
allows us to identify almost all the TFIs without including any false positive.
We also experimentally compare our method with the direct mining of
at frequency and with techniques based on widely-used
standard bounds (i.e., the Chernoff bounds) of the binomial distribution, and
show that our algorithm outperforms these methods and achieves even better
results than what is guaranteed by the theoretical analysis.Comment: 13 pages, Extended version of work appeared in SIAM International
Conference on Data Mining, 201
MCRapper: Monte-Carlo Rademacher Averages for Poset Families and Approximate Pattern Mining
We present MCRapper, an algorithm for efficient computation of Monte-Carlo
Empirical Rademacher Averages (MCERA) for families of functions exhibiting
poset (e.g., lattice) structure, such as those that arise in many pattern
mining tasks. The MCERA allows us to compute upper bounds to the maximum
deviation of sample means from their expectations, thus it can be used to find
both statistically-significant functions (i.e., patterns) when the available
data is seen as a sample from an unknown distribution, and approximations of
collections of high-expectation functions (e.g., frequent patterns) when the
available data is a small sample from a large dataset. This feature is a strong
improvement over previously proposed solutions that could only achieve one of
the two. MCRapper uses upper bounds to the discrepancy of the functions to
efficiently explore and prune the search space, a technique borrowed from
pattern mining itself. To show the practical use of MCRapper, we employ it to
develop an algorithm TFP-R for the task of True Frequent Pattern (TFP) mining.
TFP-R gives guarantees on the probability of including any false positives
(precision) and exhibits higher statistical power (recall) than existing
methods offering the same guarantees. We evaluate MCRapper and TFP-R and show
that they outperform the state-of-the-art for their respective tasks