Efficiently mining frequent itemsets in transactional databases

Abstract

Discovering frequent itemsets is an essential task in association rules mining and it is considered to be computationally expensive. To find the frequent itemsets, the algorithm of frequent pattern growth (FP-growth) is one of the best algorithms for mining frequent patterns. However, many experimental results have shown that building conditional FP-trees during mining data using this FP-growth method will consume most of CPU time. In addition, it requires a lot of space to save the FP-trees. This paper presents a new approach for mining frequent item sets from a transactional database without building the conditional FP-trees. Thus, lots of computing time and memory space can be saved. Experimental results indicate that our method can reduce lots of running time and memory usage based on the datasets obtained from the FIMI repository website.