23,077 research outputs found
Parallel Algorithm for Frequent Itemset Mining on Intel Many-core Systems
Frequent itemset mining leads to the discovery of associations and
correlations among items in large transactional databases. Apriori is a
classical frequent itemset mining algorithm, which employs iterative passes
over database combining with generation of candidate itemsets based on frequent
itemsets found at the previous iteration, and pruning of clearly infrequent
itemsets. The Dynamic Itemset Counting (DIC) algorithm is a variation of
Apriori, which tries to reduce the number of passes made over a transactional
database while keeping the number of itemsets counted in a pass relatively low.
In this paper, we address the problem of accelerating DIC on the Intel Xeon Phi
many-core system for the case when the transactional database fits in main
memory. Intel Xeon Phi provides a large number of small compute cores with
vector processing units. The paper presents a parallel implementation of DIC
based on OpenMP technology and thread-level parallelism. We exploit the
bit-based internal layout for transactions and itemsets. This technique reduces
the memory space for storing the transactional database, simplifies the support
count via logical bitwise operation, and allows for vectorization of such a
step. Experimental evaluation on the platforms of the Intel Xeon CPU and the
Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor with large synthetic and real databases showed good
performance and scalability of the proposed algorithm.Comment: Accepted for publication in Journal of Computing and Information
Technology (http://cit.fer.hr
A review of associative classification mining
Associative classification mining is a promising approach in data mining that utilizes the
association rule discovery techniques to construct classification systems, also known as
associative classifiers. In the last few years, a number of associative classification algorithms
have been proposed, i.e. CPAR, CMAR, MCAR, MMAC and others. These algorithms
employ several different rule discovery, rule ranking, rule pruning, rule prediction and rule
evaluation methods. This paper focuses on surveying and comparing the state-of-the-art associative
classification techniques with regards to the above criteria. Finally, future directions in associative
classification, such as incremental learning and mining low-quality data sets, are also
highlighted in this paper
A Model-Based Frequency Constraint for Mining Associations from Transaction Data
Mining frequent itemsets is a popular method for finding associated items in
databases. For this method, support, the co-occurrence frequency of the items
which form an association, is used as the primary indicator of the
associations's significance. A single user-specified support threshold is used
to decided if associations should be further investigated. Support has some
known problems with rare items, favors shorter itemsets and sometimes produces
misleading associations.
In this paper we develop a novel model-based frequency constraint as an
alternative to a single, user-specified minimum support. The constraint
utilizes knowledge of the process generating transaction data by applying a
simple stochastic mixture model (the NB model) which allows for transaction
data's typically highly skewed item frequency distribution. A user-specified
precision threshold is used together with the model to find local frequency
thresholds for groups of itemsets. Based on the constraint we develop the
notion of NB-frequent itemsets and adapt a mining algorithm to find all
NB-frequent itemsets in a database. In experiments with publicly available
transaction databases we show that the new constraint provides improvements
over a single minimum support threshold and that the precision threshold is
more robust and easier to set and interpret by the user
Post-processing of association rules.
In this paper, we situate and motivate the need for a post-processing phase to the association rule mining algorithm when plugged into the knowledge discovery in databases process. Major research effort has already been devoted to optimising the initially proposed mining algorithms. When it comes to effectively extrapolating the most interesting knowledge nuggets from the standard output of these algorithms, one is faced with an extreme challenge, since it is not uncommon to be confronted with a vast amount of association rules after running the algorithms. The sheer multitude of generated rules often clouds the perception of the interpreters. Rightful assessment of the usefulness of the generated output introduces the need to effectively deal with different forms of data redundancy and data being plainly uninteresting. In order to do so, we will give a tentative overview of some of the main post-processing tasks, taking into account the efforts that have already been reported in the literature.
A Tight Upper Bound on the Number of Candidate Patterns
In the context of mining for frequent patterns using the standard levelwise
algorithm, the following question arises: given the current level and the
current set of frequent patterns, what is the maximal number of candidate
patterns that can be generated on the next level? We answer this question by
providing a tight upper bound, derived from a combinatorial result from the
sixties by Kruskal and Katona. Our result is useful to reduce the number of
database scans
Finding Associations and Computing Similarity via Biased Pair Sampling
This version is ***superseded*** by a full version that can be found at
http://www.itu.dk/people/pagh/papers/mining-jour.pdf, which contains stronger
theoretical results and fixes a mistake in the reporting of experiments.
Abstract: Sampling-based methods have previously been proposed for the
problem of finding interesting associations in data, even for low-support
items. While these methods do not guarantee precise results, they can be vastly
more efficient than approaches that rely on exact counting. However, for many
similarity measures no such methods have been known. In this paper we show how
a wide variety of measures can be supported by a simple biased sampling method.
The method also extends to find high-confidence association rules. We
demonstrate theoretically that our method is superior to exact methods when the
threshold for "interesting similarity/confidence" is above the average pairwise
similarity/confidence, and the average support is not too low. Our method is
particularly good when transactions contain many items. We confirm in
experiments on standard association mining benchmarks that this gives a
significant speedup on real data sets (sometimes much larger than the
theoretical guarantees). Reductions in computation time of over an order of
magnitude, and significant savings in space, are observed.Comment: This is an extended version of a paper that appeared at the IEEE
International Conference on Data Mining, 2009. The conference version is (c)
2009 IEE
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