Unified Temporal Erasable Itemset Mining with a Lower-Bound Strategy

Abstract

Erasable itemset mining has been a valuable mining problem for manufacturers. It can extract less profitable materials from a product dataset and provide managers with good decision-making and a trade-off between cost and profit. However, the traditional erasable itemset mining methods seldom consider the time factor. For time-sensitive industries such as agro-processors, the time range is important in determining which materials are less profitable. Hong et al. first proposed the concept of temporal erasable itemset mining and seven lifespan options. They also proposed a unified temporal erasable (UTE) mining algorithm for getting incomplete temporal erasable itemsets. Howerever, the UTE algorithm does not satisfy the property of downward closure. In this work, we propose an improved algorithm to improve the performance of the UTE algorithm based on a lower-bound strategy and satisfying the property of downward closure. The proposed algorithm uses a hash table to store information that will be reused during the mining process to avoid scanning a dataset multiple times. The designed lower-bound strategy can preserve the downward closure property, narrowing the search space of candidate itemsets. In numerical experiments, we compare the performance using several metrics between the proposed method and the previous work. From the results of experiments, our proposed method outperforms the existing method on various metrics, such as execution time and the number of candidate erasable itemsets.