Comparison of different algorithms for exploting the hidden trends in data sources

Thesis (Master)--Izmir Institute of Technology, Computer Engineering, Izmir, 2003Includes bibliographical references (leaves: 92-97)Text in English; Abstract: Turkish and English97 leavesThe growth of large-scale transactional databases, time-series databases and other kinds of databases has been giving rise to the development of several efficient algorithms that cope with the computationally expensive task of association rule mining.In this study, different algorithms, Apriori, FP-tree and CHARM, for exploiting the hidden trends such as frequent itemsets, frequent patterns, closed frequent itemsets respectively, were discussed and their performances were evaluated. The perfomances of the algorithms were measured at different support levels, and the algorithms were tested on different data sets (on both synthetic and real data sets). The algorihms were compared according to their, data preparation performances, mining performance, run time performances and knowledge extraction capabilities.The Apriori algorithm is the most prevalent algorithm of association rule mining which makes multiple passes over the database aiming at finding the set of frequent itemsets for each level. The FP-Tree algorithm is a scalable algorithm which finds the crucial information as regards the complete set of prefix paths, conditional pattern bases and frequent patterns by using a compact FP-Tree based mining method. The CHARM is a novel algorithm which brings remarkable improvements over existing association rule mining algorithms by proving the fact that mining the set of closed frequent itemsets is adequate instead of mining the set of all frequent itemsets.Related to our experimental results, we conclude that the Apriori algorithm demonstrates a good performance on sparse data sets. The Fp-tree algorithm extracts less association in comparison to Apriori, however it is completelty a feasable solution that facilitates mining dense data sets at low support levels. On the other hand, the CHARM algorithm is an appropriate algorithm for mining closed frequent itemsets (a substantial portion of frequent itemsets) on both sparse and dense data sets even at low levels of support

A Survey on Index Support for Item Set Mining

It is very difficult to handle the huge amount of information stored in modern databases. To manage with these databases association rule mining is currently used, which is a costly process that involves a significant amount of time and memory. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an approach to overcome these difficulties. A suitable data structures and algorithms must be developed to effectively perform the item set mining. An index includes all necessary characteristics potentially needed during the mining task; the extraction can be executed with the help of the index, without accessing the database. A database index is a data structure that enhances the speed of information retrieval operations on a database table at very low cost and increased storage space. The use index permits user interaction, in which the user can specify different attributes for item set extraction. Therefore, the extraction can be completed with the use index and without accessing the original database. Index also supports for reusing concept to mine item sets with the use of any support threshold. This paper also focuses on the survey of index support for item set mining which are proposed by various authors

A genetic algorithm coupled with tree-based pruning for mining closed association rules

Due to the voluminous amount of itemsets that are generated, the association rules extracted from these itemsets contain redundancy, and designing an effective approach to address this issue is of paramount importance. Although multiple algorithms were proposed in recent years for mining closed association rules most of them underperform in terms of run time or memory. Another issue that remains challenging is the nature of the dataset. While some of the existing algorithms perform well on dense datasets others perform well on sparse datasets. This paper aims to handle these drawbacks by using a genetic algorithm for mining closed association rules. Recent studies have shown that genetic algorithms perform better than conventional algorithms due to their bitwise operations of crossover and mutation. Bitwise operations are predominantly faster than conventional approaches and bits consume lesser memory thereby improving the overall performance of the algorithm. To address the redundancy in the mined association rules a tree-based pruning algorithm has been designed here. This works on the principle of minimal antecedent and maximal consequent. Experiments have shown that the proposed approach works well on both dense and sparse datasets while surpassing existing techniques with regard to run time and memory

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.