Privacy Preserving Utility Mining: A Survey

In big data era, the collected data usually contains rich information and hidden knowledge. Utility-oriented pattern mining and analytics have shown a powerful ability to explore these ubiquitous data, which may be collected from various fields and applications, such as market basket analysis, retail, click-stream analysis, medical analysis, and bioinformatics. However, analysis of these data with sensitive private information raises privacy concerns. To achieve better trade-off between utility maximizing and privacy preserving, Privacy-Preserving Utility Mining (PPUM) has become a critical issue in recent years. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of PPUM. We first present the background of utility mining, privacy-preserving data mining and PPUM, then introduce the related preliminaries and problem formulation of PPUM, as well as some key evaluation criteria for PPUM. In particular, we present and discuss the current state-of-the-art PPUM algorithms, as well as their advantages and deficiencies in detail. Finally, we highlight and discuss some technical challenges and open directions for future research on PPUM.Comment: 2018 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, 10 page

Discovering High Utility Itemsets using Hybrid Approach

Mining of high utility itemsets especially from the big transactional databases is time consuming task. For mining the high utility itemsets from large transactional datasets multiple methods are available and have some consequential limitations. In case of performance these methods need to be scrutinized under low memory based systems for mining high utility itemsets from transactional datasets as well as to address further measures. The proposed algorithm combines the High Utility Pattern Mining and Incremental Frequent Pattern Mining. Two algorithms used are Apriori and existing Parallel UP Growth for mining high utility itemsets using transactional databases. The information about high utility itemsets is maintained in a data structure called UP tree. These algorithms are not only used to scans the incremental database but also collects newly generated frequent itemsets support count. It provides fast execution because it includes new itemsets in tree and removes rare itemset from a utility pattern tree structure that reduces cost and time. From various Experimental analysis and results, this hybrid approach with existing Apriori and UP-Growth is proposed with aim of improving the performance

Statistical strategies for pruning all the uninteresting association rules

We propose a general framework to describe formally the problem of capturing the intensity of implication for association rules through statistical metrics. In this framework we present properties that influence the interestingness of a rule, analyze the conditions that lead a measure to perform a perfect prune at a time, and define a final proper order to sort the surviving rules. We will discuss why none of the currently employed measures can capture objective interestingness, and just the combination of some of them, in a multi-step fashion, can be reliable. In contrast, we propose a new simple modification of the Pearson coefficient that will meet all the necessary requirements. We statistically infer the convenient cut-off threshold for this new metric by empirically describing its distribution function through simulation. Final experiments serve to show the ability of our proposal.Postprint (published version

Flexible constrained sampling with guarantees for pattern mining

Pattern sampling has been proposed as a potential solution to the infamous pattern explosion. Instead of enumerating all patterns that satisfy the constraints, individual patterns are sampled proportional to a given quality measure. Several sampling algorithms have been proposed, but each of them has its limitations when it comes to 1) flexibility in terms of quality measures and constraints that can be used, and/or 2) guarantees with respect to sampling accuracy. We therefore present Flexics, the first flexible pattern sampler that supports a broad class of quality measures and constraints, while providing strong guarantees regarding sampling accuracy. To achieve this, we leverage the perspective on pattern mining as a constraint satisfaction problem and build upon the latest advances in sampling solutions in SAT as well as existing pattern mining algorithms. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm is applicable to a variety of pattern languages, which allows us to introduce and tackle the novel task of sampling sets of patterns. We introduce and empirically evaluate two variants of Flexics: 1) a generic variant that addresses the well-known itemset sampling task and the novel pattern set sampling task as well as a wide range of expressive constraints within these tasks, and 2) a specialized variant that exploits existing frequent itemset techniques to achieve substantial speed-ups. Experiments show that Flexics is both accurate and efficient, making it a useful tool for pattern-based data exploration.Comment: Accepted for publication in Data Mining & Knowledge Discovery journal (ECML/PKDD 2017 journal track

An Approach for Mining Top-k High Utility Item Sets (HUI)

Itemsets have been extracted by utilising high utility item (HUI) mining, which provides more benefits to the consumer. This could be one of the significant domains in data mining and be resourceful for several real-time implementations. Even though modern HUI mining algorithms may identify item sets that meet the minimum utility threshold, However, fixing the minimum threshold utility value has not been a simple task, and often it is intricate for the consumers when we keep the minimum utility value low. It might generate a massive amount of itemsets, and when the value is at its maximum, it might provide a smaller amount of itemsets. To avoid these issues, top-k HUI mining, where k represents the number of HUIs to be identified, has been proposed. Further, in this manuscript, the authors projected an algorithm called the top-k exact utility (TKEU) algorithm, which works without computing and comparing transaction weighted utilisation (TWU) values and deliberates the individual utility item values for deriving the top-k HUI. The datasets are pre-processed by the proposed algorithm to lessen the system memory space and to provide optimal outcomes for condensed datasets

Towards Correlated Sequential Rules

The goal of high-utility sequential pattern mining (HUSPM) is to efficiently discover profitable or useful sequential patterns in a large number of sequences. However, simply being aware of utility-eligible patterns is insufficient for making predictions. To compensate for this deficiency, high-utility sequential rule mining (HUSRM) is designed to explore the confidence or probability of predicting the occurrence of consequence sequential patterns based on the appearance of premise sequential patterns. It has numerous applications, such as product recommendation and weather prediction. However, the existing algorithm, known as HUSRM, is limited to extracting all eligible rules while neglecting the correlation between the generated sequential rules. To address this issue, we propose a novel algorithm called correlated high-utility sequential rule miner (CoUSR) to integrate the concept of correlation into HUSRM. The proposed algorithm requires not only that each rule be correlated but also that the patterns in the antecedent and consequent of the high-utility sequential rule be correlated. The algorithm adopts a utility-list structure to avoid multiple database scans. Additionally, several pruning strategies are used to improve the algorithm's efficiency and performance. Based on several real-world datasets, subsequent experiments demonstrated that CoUSR is effective and efficient in terms of operation time and memory consumption.Comment: Preprint. 7 figures, 6 table