MBA: Market Basket Analysis Using Frequent Pattern Mining Techniques

This Market Basket Analysis (MBA) is a data mining technique that uses frequent pattern mining algorithms to discover patterns of co-occurrence among items that are frequently purchased together. It is commonly used in retail and e-commerce businesses to generate association rules that describe the relationships between different items, and to make recommendations to customers based on their previous purchases. MBA is a powerful tool for identifying patterns of co-occurrence and generating insights that can improve sales and marketing strategies. Although a numerous works has been carried out to handle the computational cost for discovering the frequent itemsets, but it still needs more exploration and developments. In this paper, we introduce an efficient Bitwise-Based data structure technique for mining frequent pattern in large-scale databases. The algorithm scans the original database once, using the Bitwise-Based data representations as well as vertical database layout, compared to the well-known Apriori and FP-Growth algorithm. Bitwise-Based technique enhance the problems of multiple passes over the original database, hence, minimizes the execution time. Extensive experiments have been carried out to validate our technique, which outperform Apriori, Éclat, FP-growth, and H-mine in terms of execution time for Market Basket Analysis

An Improved Technique for Multi-Dimensional Constrained Gradient Mining

Multi-dimensional Constrained Gradient Mining, which is an aspect of data mining, is based on mining constrained frequent gradient pattern pairs with significant difference in their measures in transactional database. Top-k Fp-growth with Gradient Pruning and Top-k Fp-growth with No Gradient Pruning were the two algorithms used for Multi-dimensional Constrained Gradient Mining in previous studies. However, these algorithms have their shortcomings. The first requires construction of Fp-tree before searching through the database and the second algorithm requires searching of database twice in finding frequent pattern pairs. These cause the problems of using large amount of time and memory space, which retrogressively make mining of database cumbersome.  Based on this anomaly, a new algorithm that combines Top-k Fp-growth with Gradient pruning and Top-k Fp-growth with No Gradient pruning is designed to eliminate these drawbacks. The new algorithm called Top-K Fp-growth with support Gradient pruning (SUPGRAP) employs the method of scanning the database once, by searching for the node and all the descendant of the node of every task at each level. The idea is to form projected Multidimensional Database and then find the Multidimensional patterns within the projected databases. The evaluation of the new algorithm shows significant improvement in terms of time and space required over the existing algorithms.  &nbsp

A Novel Frequent Pattern Mining Algorithm for Evaluating Applicability of a Mobile Learning Framework

The applicability of a mobile learning system reflects how it works in an actual situation under diverse conditions In previous studies researches for evaluating applicability in learning systems using data mining approaches are challenging to find The main objective of this study is to evaluate the applicability of the proposed mobile learning framework This framework consists of seven independent variables and their influencing factors Initially 1000 students and teachers were allowed to use the mobile learning system developed based on the proposed mobile learning framework The authors implemented the system using Moodle mobile learning environment and used its transaction log file for evaluation Transactional records that were generated due to various user activities with the facilities integrated into the system were extracted These activities were classified under eight different features i e chat forum quiz assignment book video game and app usage in thousand transactional rows A novel pattern mining algorithm namely Binary Total for Pattern Mining BTPM was developed using the above transactional dataset s binary incidence matrix format to test the system applicability Similarly Apriori frequent itemsets mining and Frequent Pattern FP Growth mining algorithms were applied to the same dataset to predict system applicabilit

Techniques for improving clustering and association rules mining from very large transactional databases

Clustering and association rules mining are two core data mining tasks that have been actively studied by data mining community for nearly two decades. Though many clustering and association rules mining algorithms have been developed, no algorithm is better than others on all aspects, such as accuracy, efficiency, scalability, adaptability and memory usage. While more efficient and effective algorithms need to be developed for handling the large-scale and complex stored datasets, emerging applications where data takes the form of streams pose new challenges for the data mining community. The existing techniques and algorithms for static stored databases cannot be applied to the data streams directly. They need to be extended or modified, or new methods need to be developed to process the data streams.In this thesis, algorithms have been developed for improving efficiency and accuracy of clustering and association rules mining on very large, high dimensional, high cardinality, sparse transactional databases and data streams.A new similarity measure suitable for clustering transactional data is defined and an incremental clustering algorithm, INCLUS, is proposed using this similarity measure. The algorithm only scans the database once and produces clusters based on the user’s expectations of similarities between transactions in a cluster, which is controlled by the user input parameters, a similarity threshold and a support threshold. Intensive testing has been performed to evaluate the effectiveness, efficiency, scalability and order insensitiveness of the algorithm.To extend INCLUS for transactional data streams, an equal-width time window model and an elastic time window model are proposed that allow mining of clustering changes in evolving data streams. The minimal width of the window is determined by the minimum clustering granularity for a particular application. Two algorithms, CluStream_EQ and CluStream_EL, based on the equal-width window model and the elastic window model respectively, are developed by incorporating these models into INCLUS. Each algorithm consists of an online micro-clustering component and an offline macro-clustering component. The online component writes summary statistics of a data stream to the disk, and the offline components uses those summaries and other user input to discover changes in a data stream. The effectiveness and scalability of the algorithms are evaluated by experiments.This thesis also looks into sampling techniques that can improve efficiency of mining association rules in a very large transactional database. The sample size is derived based on the binomial distribution and central limit theorem. The sample size used is smaller than that based on Chernoff Bounds, but still provides the same approximation guarantees. The accuracy of the proposed sampling approach is theoretically analyzed and its effectiveness is experimentally evaluated on both dense and sparse datasets.Applications of stratified sampling for association rules mining is also explored in this thesis. The database is first partitioned into strata based on the length of transactions, and simple random sampling is then performed on each stratum. The total sample size is determined by a formula derived in this thesis and the sample size for each stratum is proportionate to the size of the stratum. The accuracy of transaction size based stratified sampling is experimentally compared with that of random sampling.The thesis concludes with a summary of significant contributions and some pointers for further work