A Fast Algorithm For Data Mining

In the past few years, there has been a keen interest in mining frequent itemsets in large data repositories. Frequent itemsets correspond to the set of items that occur frequently in transactions in a database. Several novel algorithms have been developed recently to mine closed frequent itemsets - these itemsets are a subset of the frequent itemsets. These algorithms are of practical value: they can be applied to real-world applications to extract patterns of interest in data repositories. However, prior to using an algorithm in practice, it is necessary to know its performance as well implementation issues. In this project, we address such a need for the algorithm “Using Attribute Value Lattice to Find Frequent Itemsets” that was developed by Lin et. al. We clarify some aspects of the algorithm, develop an implementation of the algorithm, and present the results of a performance study. In our experiments we find that the running time of the algorithm for certain input datasets grows exponentially. To address this problem, we develop a novel procedure for binning the data. Our results show that with binned data, the running time of the algorithm grows linearly. This allows one to obtain trends for the dataset

Mining frequent itemsets a perspective from operations research

Many papers on frequent itemsets have been published. Besides somecontests in this field were held. In the majority of the papers the focus ison speed. Ad hoc algorithms and datastructures were introduced. Inthis paper we put most of the algorithms in one framework, usingclassical Operations Research paradigms such as backtracking, depth-first andbreadth-first search, and branch-and-bound. Moreover we presentexperimental results where the different algorithms are implementedunder similar designs.data mining;operation research;Frequent itemsets

Edge-based mining of frequent subgraphs from graph streams

In the current era of Big data, high volumes of valuable data can be generated at a high velocity from high-varieties of data sources in various real-life applications ranging from sensor networks to social networks, from bio-informatics to chemical informatics. In addition, Big data are also available in business, education, engineering, finance, healthcare, scientific, telecommunication, and transportation domains. A collection of these data can be viewed as a big dynamic graph structure. Embedded in them are implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful knowledge. Consequently, efficient knowledge discovery algorithms for mining frequent subgraphs from these dynamic streaming graph structured data are in demand. On the one hand, some existing algorithms discover collections of frequently co-occurring edges, which may be disjoint. On the other hand, some other existing algorithms discover frequent subgraphs by requiring very large memory space. With high volumes of Big data, available memory space may be limited. To discover collections of frequently co-occurring connected edges, we present in this paper two efficient algorithms that require small memory space. Evaluation results show the efficiency of our edge-based algorithms in mining frequent subgraphs from graph streams

Colossal Trajectory Mining: A unifying approach to mine behavioral mobility patterns

Spatio-temporal mobility patterns are at the core of strategic applications such as urban planning and monitoring. Depending on the strength of spatio-temporal constraints, different mobility patterns can be defined. While existing approaches work well in the extraction of groups of objects sharing fine-grained paths, the huge volume of large-scale data asks for coarse-grained solutions. In this paper, we introduce Colossal Trajectory Mining (CTM) to efficiently extract heterogeneous mobility patterns out of a multidimensional space that, along with space and time dimensions, can consider additional trajectory features (e.g., means of transport or activity) to characterize behavioral mobility patterns. The algorithm is natively designed in a distributed fashion, and the experimental evaluation shows its scalability with respect to the involved features and the cardinality of the trajectory dataset

Frequent itemset mining on multiprocessor systems

Frequent itemset mining is an important building block in many data mining applications like market basket analysis, recommendation, web-mining, fraud detection, and gene expression analysis. In many of them, the datasets being mined can easily grow up to hundreds of gigabytes or even terabytes of data. Hence, efficient algorithms are required to process such large amounts of data. In recent years, there have been many frequent-itemset mining algorithms proposed, which however (1) often have high memory requirements and (2) do not exploit the large degrees of parallelism provided by modern multiprocessor systems. The high memory requirements arise mainly from inefficient data structures that have only been shown to be sufficient for small datasets. For large datasets, however, the use of these data structures force the algorithms to go out-of-core, i.e., they have to access secondary memory, which leads to serious performance degradations. Exploiting available parallelism is further required to mine large datasets because the serial performance of processors almost stopped increasing. Algorithms should therefore exploit the large number of available threads and also the other kinds of parallelism (e.g., vector instruction sets) besides thread-level parallelism. In this work, we tackle the high memory requirements of frequent itemset mining twofold: we (1) compress the datasets being mined because they must be kept in main memory during several mining invocations and (2) improve existing mining algorithms with memory-efficient data structures. For compressing the datasets, we employ efficient encodings that show a good compression performance on a wide variety of realistic datasets, i.e., the size of the datasets is reduced by up to 6.4x. The encodings can further be applied directly while loading the dataset from disk or network. Since encoding and decoding is repeatedly required for loading and mining the datasets, we reduce its costs by providing parallel encodings that achieve high throughputs for both tasks. For a memory-efficient representation of the mining algorithms’ intermediate data, we propose compact data structures and even employ explicit compression. Both methods together reduce the intermediate data’s size by up to 25x. The smaller memory requirements avoid or delay expensive out-of-core computation when large datasets are mined. For coping with the high parallelism provided by current multiprocessor systems, we identify the performance hot spots and scalability issues of existing frequent-itemset mining algorithms. The hot spots, which form basic building blocks of these algorithms, cover (1) counting the frequency of fixed-length strings, (2) building prefix trees, (3) compressing integer values, and (4) intersecting lists of sorted integer values or bitmaps. For all of them, we discuss how to exploit available parallelism and provide scalable solutions. Furthermore, almost all components of the mining algorithms must be parallelized to keep the sequential fraction of the algorithms as small as possible. We integrate the parallelized building blocks and components into three well-known mining algorithms and further analyze the impact of certain existing optimizations. Our algorithms are already single-threaded often up an order of magnitude faster than existing highly optimized algorithms and further scale almost linear on a large 32-core multiprocessor system. Although our optimizations are intended for frequent-itemset mining algorithms, they can be applied with only minor changes to algorithms that are used for mining of other types of itemsets

Mining frequent itemsets a perspective from operations research

Many papers on frequent itemsets have been published. Besides some contests in this field were held. In the majority of the papers the focus is on speed. Ad hoc algorithms and datastructures were introduced. In this paper we put most of the algorithms in one framework, using classical Operations Research paradigms such as backtracking, depth-first and breadth-first search, and branch-and-bound. Moreover we present experimental results where the different algorithms are implemented under similar designs