From the standpoint of supporting human-centered discovery of knowledge, the present-day model of mining association rules suffers from the following serious shortcom- ings: (i) lack of user exploration and control, (ii) lack of focus, and (iii) rigid notion of relationships. In effect, this model functions as a black-box, admitting little user interaction in between. We propose, in this paper, an architecture that opens up the black-box, and supports constraintbased, human-centered exploratory mining of associations. The foundation of this architecture is a rich set of con- straint constructs, including domain, class, and $QL-style aggregate constraints, which enable users to clearly specify what associations are to be mined. We propose constrained association queries as a means of specifying the constraints to be satisfied by the antecedent and consequent of a mined association.

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 ...

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

Mining frequent closed itemsets provides complete and nonredundant results for frequent pattern analysis. Extensive studies have proposed various strategies for efficient frequent closed itemset mining, such as depth-first search vs. breadthfirst search, vertical formats vs. horizontal formats, treestructure vs. other data structures, top-down vs. bottomup traversal, pseudo projection vs. physical projection of conditional database, etc. It is the right time to ask “what are the pros and cons of the strategies? ” and “what and how can we pick and integrate the best strategies to achieve higher performance in general cases?” In this study, we answer the above questions by a systematic study of the search strategies and develop a winning algorithm CLOSET+. CLOSET+ integrates the advantages of the previously proposed effective strategies as well as some ones newly developed here. A thorough performance study on synthetic and real data sets has shown the advantages of the strategies and the improvement of CLOSET+ over existing mining algorithms, including CLOSET, CHARM and OP, in terms of runtime, memory usage and scalability.

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...

Clustering in data mining is a discovery process that groups a set of data such that the intracluster similarity is maximized and the intercluster similarity is minimized. These discovered clusters are used to explain the characteristics of the data distribution. In this paper we propose a new methodology for clustering related items using association rules, and clustering related transactions using clusters of items. Our approach is linearly scalable with respect to the number of transactions. The frequent item-sets used to derive association rules are also used to group items into a hypergraph edge, and a hypergraph partitioning algorithm is used to find the clusters. Our experiments indicate that clustering using association rule hypergraphs holds great promise in several application domains. Our experiments with stock-market data and congressional voting data show that this clustering scheme is able to successfully group items that belong to the same group. Clustering of items can ...

To cluster increasingly massive data sets that are common today in data and text mining, we propose a parallel implementation of the k-means clustering algorithm based on the message passing model. The proposed algorithm exploits the inherent data-parallelism in the k-means algorithm. We analytically show that the speedup and the scaleup of our algorithm approach the optimal as the number of data points increases. We implemented our algorithm on an IBM POWERparallel SP2 with a maximum of 16 nodes. On typical test data sets, we observe nearly linear relative speedups, for example, 15.62 on 16 nodes, and essentially linear scaleup in the size of the data set and in the number of clusters desired. For a 2 gigabyte test data set, our implementation drives the 16 node SP2 at more than 1.8 gigaflops. Keywords: k-means, data mining, massive data sets, message-passing, text mining. 1 Introduction Data sets measuring in gigabytes and even terabytes are now quite common in data and text minin...

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.

Knowledge discovery in databases, also known as data mining, is the efficient discovery of previously unknown, valid, novel, potentially useful, and understandable patterns in large databases. It encompasses many different techniques and algorithms which differ in the kinds of data that can be analyzed and the form of knowledge representation used to convey the discovered knowledge. An important problem in the area of data mining is the development of effective measures of interestingness for ranking the discovered knowledge. In this report, we provide a general overview of the more successful and widely known data mining techniques and algorithms, and survey seventeen interestingness measures from the literature that have been successfully employed in data mining applications. 1 1