Mining frequent patterns in transaction databases, time-series databases, and many other kinds of databases has been studied popularly in data mining research. Most of the previous studies adopt an Apriori-like candidate set generation-and-test approach. However, candidate set generation is still costly, especially when there exist a large number of patterns and/or long patterns. In this study, we propose a novel frequent-pattern tree (FP-tree) structure, which is an extended prefix-tree structure for storing compressed, crucial information about frequent patterns, and develop an efficient FP-tree- based mining method, FP-growth, for mining the complete set of frequent patterns by pattern fragment growth. Efficiency of mining is achieved with three techniques: (1) a large database is compressed into a condensed, smaller data structure, FP-tree which avoids costly, repeated database scans, (2) our FP-tree-based mining adopts a pattern-fragment growth method to avoid the costly generation of a large number of candidate sets, and (3) a partitioning-based, divide-and-conquer method is used to decompose the mining task into a set of smaller tasks for mining confined patterns in conditional databases, which dramatically reduces the search space. Our performance study shows that the FP-growth method is efficient and scalable for mining both long and short frequent patterns, and is about an order of magnitude faster than the Apriori algorithm and also faster than some recently reported new frequent-pattern mining methods

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Association mining may often derive an undesirably large set of frequent itemsets and association rules. Recent studies have proposed an interesting alternative: mining frequent closed itemsets and their corresponding rules, which has the same power as association mining but substantially reduces the number of rules to be presented. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm, CLOSET, for mining closed itemsets, with the development of three techniques: (1) applying a compressed, frequent pattern tree FP-tree structure for mining closed itemsets without candidate generation, (2) developing a single prefix path compression technique to identify frequent closed itemsets quickly, and (3) exploring a partition-based projection mechanism for scalable mining in large databases. Our performance study shows that CLOSET is efficient and scalable over large databases, and is faster than the previously proposed methods. 1 Introduction It has been well recognized that frequent pattern minin...

We present a new algorithm for mining maximal frequent itemsets from a transactional database. Our algorithm is especially efficient when the itemsets in the database are very long. The search strategy of our algorithm integrates a depth-first traversal of the itemset lattice with effective pruning mechanisms. Our implementation of the search strategy combines a vertical bitmap representation of the database with an efficient relative bitmap compression schema. In a thorough experimental analysis of our algorithm on real data, we isolate the effect of the individual components of the algorithm. Our performance numbers show that our algorithm outperforms previous work by a factor of three to five. 1

Web usage mining, possibly used in conjunction with standard approaches to personalization such as collaborative filtering, can help address some of the shortcomings of these techniques, including reliance on subjective user ratings, lack of scalability, and poor performance in the face of high-dimensional and sparse data. However, the discovery of patterns from usage data by itself is not sufficient for performing the personalization tasks. The critical step is the effective derivation of good quality and useful (i.e., actionable) "aggregate usage profiles" from these patterns. In this paper we present and experimentally evaluate two techniques, based on clustering of user transactions and clustering of pageviews, in order to discover overlapping aggregate profiles that can be effectively used by recommender systems for real-time Web personalization. We evaluate these techniques both in terms of the quality of the individual profiles generated, as well as in the context of providing recommendations as an integrated part of a personalization engine. In particular, our results indicate that using the generated aggregate profiles, we can achieve effective personalization at early stages of users' visits to a site, based only on anonymous clickstream data and without the benefit of explicit input by these users or deeper knowledge about them.

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Abstract — Over the years, frequent itemset discovery algorithms have been used to find interesting patterns in various application areas. However, as data mining techniques are being increasingly applied to non-traditional domains, existing frequent pattern discovery approach cannot be used. This is because the transaction framework that is assumed by these algorithms cannot be used to effectively model the datasets in these domains. An alternate way of modeling the objects in these datasets is to represent them using graphs. Within that model, one way of formulating the frequent pattern discovery problem is as that of discovering subgraphs that occur frequently over the entire set of graphs. In this paper we present a computationally efficient algorithm, called FSG, for finding all frequent subgraphs in large graph datasets. We experimentally evaluate the performance of FSG using a variety of real and synthetic datasets. Our results show that despite the underlying complexity associated with frequent subgraph discovery, FSG is effective in finding all frequently occurring subgraphs in datasets containing over 200,000 graph transactions and scales linearly with respect to the size of the dataset. Index Terms — Data mining, scientific datasets, frequent pattern discovery, chemical compound datasets.

To engage visitors to a Web site at a very early stage (i.e., before registration or authentication), personalization tools must rely primarily on clickstreamdata captured in Web server logs. The lack of explicit user ratings as well as the sparse nature and the large volume of data in such a setting poses serious challenges to standard collaborative filtering techniques in terms of scalability and performance. Web usage mining techniques such as clustering that rely on offline pattern discovery from user transactions can be used to improve the scalability of collaborative filtering, however, this is often at the cost of redfied recommendation accuracy. In this paper we propose effective and scalable techniques for Web personalization based on association rule d scovery from usage data. Through detailed experimental evaluation on real usage data, we show that the proposed methodology can achieve better recommend tion effectiveness, while maintaining a computational advantage over direct approaches to collaborative filtering such as the k-nearest-neighbor strategy.

Methods for efficient mining of frequent patterns have been studied extensively by many researchers. However, the previously proposed methods still encounter some performance bottlenecks when mining databases with different data characteristics, such as dense vs. sparse, long vs. short patterns, memory-based vs. disk-based, etc.

Department of Computer Science, University of Minnesota,