The problem of discovering association rules has received considerable research attention and several fast algorithms for mining association rules have been developed. In practice, users are often interested in a subset of association rules. For example, they may only want rules that contain a specific item or rules that contain children of a specific item in a hierarchy. While such constraints can be applied as a postprocessing step, integrating them into the mining algorithm can dramatically reduce the execution time. We consider the problem of integrating constraints that are boolean expressions over the presence or absence of items into the association discovery algorithm. We present three integrated algorithms for mining association rules with item constraints and discuss their tradeoffs. 1. Introduction The problem of discovering association rules was introduced in (Agrawal, Imielinski, & Swami 1993). Given a set of transactions, where each transaction is a set of literals (call...

Association rule discovery has emerged as an important problem in knowledge discovery and data mining. The association mining task consists of identifying the frequent itemsets, and then forming conditional implication rules among them. In this paper we present efficient algorithms for the discovery of frequent itemsets, which forms the compute intensive phase of the task. The algorithms utilize the structural properties of frequent itemsets to facilitate fast discovery. The items are organized into a subset lattice search space, which is decomposed into small independent chunks or sub-lattices, which can be solved in memory. Ecient lattice traversal techniques are presented, which quickly identify all the long frequent itemsets, and their subsets if required. We also present the effect of using different database layout schemes combined with the proposed decomposition and traversal techniques. We experimentally compare the new algorithms against the previous approaches, obtaining ...

One of the important problems in data mining is discovering association rules from databases of transactions where each transaction consists of a set of items. The most time consuming operation in this discovery process is the computation of the frequency of the occurrences of interesting subset of items (called candidates) in the database of transactions. To prune the exponentially large space of candidates, most existing algorithms, consider only those candidates that have a user defined minimum support. Even with the pruning, the task of finding all association rules requires a lot of computation power and time. Parallel computers offer a potential solution to the computation requirement of this task, provided efficient and scalable parallel algorithms can be designed. In this paper, we present two new parallel algorithms for mining association rules. The Intelligent Data Distribution algorithm efficiently uses aggregate memory of the parallel computer by employing intelligent candi...

In this paper we propose algorithms for generation of frequent itemsets by successive construction of the nodes of a lexicographic tree of itemsets. We discuss di erent strategies in generation and traversal of the lexicographic tree such as breadth- rst search, depth- rst search or a combination of the two. These techniques provide di erent trade-o s in terms of the I/O, memory and computational time requirements. We use the hierarchical structure of the lexicographic tree to successively project transactions at each node of the lexicographic tree, and use matrix counting on this reduced set of transactions for nding frequent itemsets. We tested our algorithm on both real and synthetic data. We provide an implementation of the tree projection method which is up to one order of magnitude faster than other recent techniques in the literature. The algorithm has a well structured data access pattern which provides data locality and reuse of data for multiple levels of the cache. We also discuss methods for parallelization of the

The increasing performance and decreasing cost of processors and memory are causing system intelligence to move into peripherals from the CPU. Storage system designers are using this trend toward "excess" compute power to perform more complex processing and optimizations inside storage devices. To date, such optimizations have been at relatively low levels of the storage protocol. At the same time, trends in storage density, mechanics, and electronics are eliminating the bottleneck in moving data off the media and putting pressure on interconnects and host processors to move data more efficiently. We propose a system called Active Disks that takes advantage of processing power on individual disk drives to run application-level code. Moving portions of an application's processing to execute directly at disk drives can dramatically reduce data traffic and take advantage of the storage parallelism already present in large systems today. We discuss several types of appl...

Data mining on large data warehouses is becoming increasingly important. In support of this trend, we consider a spectrum of architectural alternatives for coupling mining with database systems. These alternatives include: loosecoupling through a SQL cursor interface; encapsulation of a mining algorithm in a stored procedure; caching the data to a file system on-the-fly and mining; tight-coupling using primarily user-defined functions; and SQL implementations for processing in the DBMS. We comprehensively study the option of expressing the mining algorithm in the form of SQL queries using Association rule mining as a case in point. We consider four options in SQL-92 and six options in SQL enhanced with object-relational extensions (SQL-OR). Our evaluation of the different architectural alternatives shows that from a performance perspective, the Cache-Mine option is superior, although the performance of the SQL-OR option is within a factor of two. Both the Cache-Mine and the SQL-OR app...

This article presents a survey of the state-of-the-art in parallel and distributed association rule mining (ARM) algorithms. This is direly needed given the importance of association rules to data mining, and given the tremendous amount of research it has attracted in recent years. This article provides a taxonomy of the extant association mining methods, characterizing them according to the database format used, search and enumeration techniques utilized, and depending on whether they enumerate all or only maximal patterns, and their complexity in terms of the number of database scans. The survey clearly lists the design space of the parallel and distributed ARM algorithms based on the platform used (distributed or sharedmemory) , kind of parallelism exploited (task or data), and the load balancing strategy used (static or dynamic). A large number of parallel and distributed ARM methods are reviewed and grouped into related techniques. It is shown that there are a few dominan...

Discovering frequent itemsets is a key problem in important data mining applications, such as the discovery of association rules, strong rules, episodes, and minimal keys. Typical algorithms for solving this problem operate in a bottom-up breadth-first search direction. The computation starts from frequent 1-itemsets (minimal length frequent itemsets) and continues until all maximal (length) frequent itemsets are found. During the execution, every frequent itemset is explicitly considered. Such algorithms perform reasonably well when all maximal frequent itemsets are short. However, performance drastically decreases when some of the maximal frequent itemsets are relatively long. We present a new algorithm which combines both the bottom-up and top-down directions. The main search direction is still bottom-up but a restricted search is conducted in the top-down direction. This search is used only for maintaining and updating a new data structure we designed, the maximum frequent candidat...

Abstract Freeblock scheduling is a new approach to utilizing more of a disk's potential media bandwidth. By filling rotational latency periods with useful media transfers, 20-50 % of a never-idle disk's bandwidth can often be provided to background applications with no effect on foreground response times. This paper describes freeblock scheduling and demonstrates its value with simulation studies of two concrete applications: segment cleaning and data mining. Free segment cleaning often allows an LFS file system to maintain its ideal write performance when cleaning overheads would otherwise reduce performance by up to a factor of three. Free data mining can achieve over 47 full disk scans per day on an active transaction processing system, with no effect on its disk performance.

Abstract. In this paper we present a new parallel algorithm for data mining of association rules on shared-memory multiprocessors. We study the degree of parallelism, synchronization, and data locality issues, and present optimizations for fast frequency computation. Experiments show that a significant improvement of performance is achieved using our proposed optimizations. We also achieved good speed-up for the parallel algorithm. A lot of data-mining tasks (e.g. association rules, sequential patterns) use complex pointer-based data structures (e.g. hash trees) that typically suffer from suboptimal data locality. In the multiprocessor case shared access to these data structures may also result in false sharing. For these tasks it is commonly observed that the recursive data structure is built once and accessed multiple times during each iteration. Furthermore, the access patterns after the build phase are highly ordered. In such cases locality and false sharing sensitive memory placement of these structures can enhance performance significantly. We evaluate a set of placement policies for parallel association discovery, and show that simple placement schemes can improve execution time by more than a factor of two. More complex schemes yield additional gains.