Itemset Mining Approach Research Articles

Context-based irregular activity detection in event logs for forensic investigations: An itemset mining approach

Event logs are a powerful source of digital evidence as they contain detailed information about activities performed on a computer. Forensic investigation of the event logs is a challenging and time-consuming task due to their large volume and continuous generation. A significant amount of time, effort, and knowledge is required to interpret their contents, discovering irregular events that are potentially pertinent to the investigation. As the number of digital investigations increases, so too must resources available to investigators. This requires new techniques to make the process easier and faster, reducing the burden on human investigators as well as being resource efficient. In this paper, a novel solution is presented to examine event logs and automatically identify irregular activities during forensic analysis. The proposed solution utilises a rare itemset mining approach to establish relationships among event entries, based on their contents. Following on, identified event relationships are ordered based on their temporal order to represent the timeline or sequence of activity. The solution is also capable of prioritising identified activities by calculating their degree of irregularity. The empirical analysis is performed on 15 live machines, and the results are discussed in terms of accuracy and performance metrics.

A High Utility Itemset Mining Algorithm Based on Particle Filter

High utility itemset mining is an interesting research in the field of data mining, which can find more valuable information than frequent itemset mining. Several high‐utility itemset mining approaches have already been proposed; however, they have high computational costs and low efficiency. To solve this problem, a high‐utility itemset mining algorithm based on the particle filter is proposed. This approach first initializes a population, which consists of particle sets. Then, to update the particle sets and their weights, a novel state transition model is suggested. Finally, the approach alleviates the particle degradation problem by resampling. Substantial experiments on the UCI datasets show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the other previous algorithms in terms of efficiency, the number of high‐utility itemsets, and convergence.

CC-IFIM: an efficient approach for incremental frequent itemset mining based on closed candidates

Frequent itemset mining (FIM) is the crucial task in mining association rules that finds all frequent k-itemsets in the transaction dataset from which all association rules are extracted. In the big-data era, the datasets are huge and rapidly expanding, so adding new transactions as time advances results in periodic changes in correlations and frequent itemsets present in the dataset. Re-mining the updated dataset is impractical and costly. This problem is solved via incremental frequent itemset mining. Numerous researchers view the new transactions as a distinct dataset (partition) that may be mined to obtain all of its frequent item sets. The extracted local frequent itemsets are then combined to create a collection of global candidates, where it is possible to estimate the support count of the combined candidates to avoid re-scanning the dataset. However, these works are hampered by the growth of a huge number of candidates, and the support count estimation is still imprecise. In this paper, the Closed Candidates-based Incremental Frequent Itemset Mining approach, or CC-IFIM, has been proposed to decrease candidate generation and improve the accuracy of the global frequent itemsets that are retrieved. The proposed approach is able to prune several produced candidates in earlier steps before performing any further computations. To improve the accuracy of the computation of the support count of the produced candidates, the similarity between partitions has been evaluated using just the local closed candidates rather than all candidates. The experimental findings demonstrated that the CC-IFIM approach is superior to its competitors in terms of efficiency and accuracy.

The Mining Algorithm of Maximum Frequent Itemsets Based on Frequent Pattern Tree.

In the discipline of data mining, association rule mining is an important study topic that focuses on discovering the relationships between database attributes. The maximum frequent itemset comprises the information of all frequent itemsets, which is one of the important difficulties in mining association rules, and certain data mining applications just need to mine the maximum frequent itemsets. As a result, analyzing the maximum frequent itemset mining technique is practical. Considering this, the research introduces FP-MFIA, a new maximum frequent itemset mining approach based on the FP-tree, which is inspired by the data structure of the frequent pattern tree and the idea that the maximum frequent itemset implies all frequent itemsets. First, the FP-MFIA constructs a one-way FP-tree structure, which only has pointers from the root to the leaves, so that only two scans of the FP-tree are required by the FP-MFIA. On the other hand, it redefines a data storage structure MFI-list for maximum frequent itemsets. It can quickly release unnecessary nodes in the FP-tree after scanning it. In this way, not only the information required by the maximum frequent itemsets can be quickly mined but also the space required for storing the maximum frequent itemsets can be reduced, which greatly improves the mining efficiency. Finally, experiments were conducted to compare the mining efficiency of the novel FP-MFIA algorithm to the IDMFIA and DMFIA algorithms. We can see from the findings that the FP-MFIA algorithm is more efficient than the other two techniques.

High Median Utility Itemset Mining for recovering streaming window transaction using novel Modified Heap‐based Optimization

AbstractHigh utility itemsets (HUIs) are items in the dynamically streaming transaction list that generate a high‐profit margin. Many of the real‐time applications depend on finding HUIs from the transaction list. However, HUI mining is time‐consuming and results in high complexity due to memory requirements, a large search space, and the cost of HUI estimation. To overcome these issues we have proposed a novel High Median Utility Itemset Mining (HMUIM) approach. This approach utilizes the HMUI‐Miner which effectively ignores the unnecessary itemsets, that is, items with less profit, and mines the HUIs from the database. Furthermore, it has the limitation of deleting the transaction list based on the sliding window size used while conducting a dynamic streaming dataset. To tackle this issue we proposed a novel Modified Heap‐based Optimizer (MHBO) algorithm which effectively copies the HUIs transaction list and preserves it for further process. The MHBO is the combination of Heap Based Optimizer and nine fuzzy rules. The fuzzy rules are used to analyze the priority of the transaction list and based on that it ignores the transaction list with low priorities. Experimental analysis is performed for the proposed method on the real‐time dataset and compared with HUI and HAUIM approaches. The proposed method reduces the execution time and memory usage based on the minimum threshold. Meanwhile, the proposed MHBO approach is compared with iMEFIM, REX, and FCHUIM state‐of‐art works based on the sliding window concept. The execution time to store the replicated copies of original data is less for our proposed method.

Product bundling for online supermarkets by frequent itemset mining and optimization approach

Bundling is an important strategy for online supermarkets to promote sales. A proper bundle can not only bring profits to the retailer, but also can provide convenience to consumers. However, the number of products sold by the online supermarkets are extremely large, and customers may vary at different cities. How to generate bundles from a large number of products and according to the consumption characters of different cities is a major challenge for online supermarkets. In this paper, a product bundling model considering different city levels was proposed. First, the frequent itemset were found based on the analysis of association rules. The sales contribution rate was introduced to identify the profitability of frequent itemset for different city levels, and based on which an optimizing model was formulated to select proper itemset as bundles. The results of numerical experiments show that bundles can be effectively selected across different city levels, and by bundling the income of the seller can be increased.

WITHDRAWN: Robust frequency affinity-based high utility itemset mining approach using multiple minimum utility

Abstract High-Utility-Itemset Mining (HUIM) is intended to discover exceedingly significant patterns by considering buy amounts and unit benefits of things. The greater part of the HUIM calculations is intended for static databases. In the present genuine applications, for example, market basket examination, business decision making and association data of web administrations, extensive volumes of databases are expanding slowly through embedding new information. The customary mining calculations are not reasonable for handling these dynamic databases and extricating helpful data. In this paper, a novel mining approach is introduced for incremental transactional databases to alter the discovered high utility itemsets. Instead of high utility values in each transaction, an affinity utility value is employed for discovering highly profitable itemsets with strong frequency affinity. Along with this, an upper bound knowledge-weighted utilization (KWU) is utilized to maintain the downward closure property. Wide spread experimental analyses showed that the suggested Itemset Mining approach is very effective and scalable for mining fascinating HUIP mining.

A guided FP-Growth algorithm for mining multitude-targeted item-sets and class association rules in imbalanced data

Identifying frequent item-sets is a popular data-mining task. It consists of finding sets of items frequently appearing in data. Yet, finding all frequent item-sets in large or dense datasets may be time-consuming, and a user may be interested merely in some specific item-sets rather than all of them. Recently, methods have been proposed for targeted item-set mining; that is to calculate the support of some item-sets of interest. Though this approach is often more suitable for real applications than traditional item-set mining approaches, performance remains an issue. To address that issue, this paper presents a novel algorithm for multitude-targeted mining, named Guided Frequent Pattern-Growth (GFP-Growth). The GFP-Growth algorithm is designed to quickly mine a given set of item-sets using a small amount of memory. This paper proves that GFP-Growth yields the exact frequency-counts for each item-set of interest. It further shows that GFP-Growth can boost the performance for several problems requiring item-set mining. We specifically study the problem of generating minority-class rules from imbalanced data and develop the Minority-Report Algorithm (MRA) that uses GFP-Growth to solve this problem efficiently. We prove several theoretical properties of MRA and present experimental results showing substantial performance gain.

Directions of membrane separator development for microbial fuel cells: A retrospective analysis using frequent itemset mining and descriptive statistical approach

To increase the efficiency of microbial fuel cells (MFCs), the separator (which is mostly a membrane) placed between the electrodes or their compartments is considered of high importance besides several other biotic and abiotic factors (e.g. configuration, mode of operation, types of inoculum and substrate). Nafion-based proton exchange membranes (PEMs) are the most widespread, although these materials are often criticized on various technological and economical grounds. Therefore, to find alternatives of Nafion, the synthesis, development and testing of novel/commercialized membrane separators with enhanced characteristics have been hot topics. In this study, the goals were to assess the membrane-installed MFCs in a retrospective manner and reveal the trends, the applied practices, frequent setups, etc. via Bayesian classification and frequent itemset mining algorithms. Thereafter, a separate discussion was devoted to examine the current standing of research related to major membrane groups used in MFCs and evaluate in accordance with the big picture how the various systems behave in comparison with each other, especially compared to those applying Nafion PEM. It was concluded that some membrane types seem to be competitive to Nafion, however, the standardization of the experiments would drive the more unambiguous comparison of studies.

Discovering informative features in large-scale landmark image collection

One of the key problems in image retrieval systems is the presence of irrelevant and noisy image content. Such content can cause significant confusion for the system. Therefore, there is a need to represent images with only informative features in order to improve the retrieval performance of the system or any subsequent process. In this article, we propose a method to identify the informative features in a large-scale image collection. We apply the frequent itemset mining (FIM) approach to extract visual features patterns from a list of images of the same object. Then, we generate feature pairs to measure the significance of each feature depending on the co-occurrence with its neighbouring features. In addition, we apply this feature selection technique to localise the landmark in the image. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated in terms of average precision (AP) on two benchmark data sets and found that it gives a comparable retrieval performance over the bag of visual words baseline system and the previous methods.

K-PbC: an improved cluster center initialization for categorical data clustering

The performance of a partitional clustering algorithm is influenced by the initial random choice of cluster centers. Different runs of the clustering algorithm on the same data set often yield different results. This paper addresses that challenge by proposing an algorithm named k-PbC, which takes advantage of non-random initialization from the view of pattern mining to improve clustering quality. Specifically, k-PbC first performs a maximal frequent itemset mining approach to find a set of initial clusters. It then uses a kernel-based method to form cluster centers and an information-theoretic based dissimilarity measure to estimate the distance between cluster centers and data objects. An extensive experimental study was performed on various real categorical data sets to draw a comparison between k-PbC and state-of-the-art categorical clustering algorithms in terms of clustering quality. Comparative results have revealed that the proposed initialization method can enhance clustering results and k-PbC outperforms compared algorithms for both internal and external validation metrics.

Query optimisation in real-time spatial big data

Nowadays, real-time spatial applications have become more and more important. Such applications result dynamic environments where data as well as queries are continuously moving. As a result, there is a tremendous amount of real-time spatial data generated every day. The growth of the data volume seems to outspeed the advance of databases and data warehouses especially that users expect to receive the results of each query within a short time period without holding into account the load of the system. To solve this problem, several optimisation techniques are used. Thus, we propose, as a first contribution, a novel data partitioning approach for real-time spatial big data named vertical partitioning approach for real-time spatial big data (VPA-RTSBD). This contribution is an implementation of the matching algorithm for traditional vertical partitioning. Then, as a second contribution, we propose a new frequent itemset mining approach which relaxes the notion of window size and proposes a new algorithm named PrePost*-RTSBD. Thereafter, a simulation study is shown to prove that our contributions can achieve a significant performance improvement.

Query optimisation in real-time spatial big data

Nowadays, real-time spatial applications have become more and more important. Such applications result dynamic environments where data as well as queries are continuously moving. As a result, there is a tremendous amount of real-time spatial data generated every day. The growth of the data volume seems to outspeed the advance of databases and data warehouses especially that users expect to receive the results of each query within a short time period without holding into account the load of the system. To solve this problem, several optimisation techniques are used. Thus, we propose, as a first contribution, a novel data partitioning approach for real-time spatial big data named vertical partitioning approach for real-time spatial big data (VPA-RTSBD). This contribution is an implementation of the matching algorithm for traditional vertical partitioning. Then, as a second contribution, we propose a new frequent itemset mining approach which relaxes the notion of window size and proposes a new algorithm named PrePost*-RTSBD. Thereafter, a simulation study is shown to prove that our contributions can achieve a significant performance improvement.

When order sets do not align with clinician workflow: assessing practice patterns in the electronic health record

BackgroundOrder sets are widely used tools in the electronic health record (EHR) for improving healthcare quality. However, there is limited insight into how well they facilitate clinician workflow. We assessed...

Finding Similar Documents Using Frequent Pattern Mining Methods

Various problems are just rising with regard to mining in massive datasets, among which finding similar documents can be pinpointed. The Shingling method converts this problem to a set-based problem. Some of existing methods have used min-hashing to compress the results already driven from the shingling method and then have exploited LSH method to find candidate pairs for similarity search from all pairs of documents. In this paper, an apriori-based method is proposed for finding similar documents based on frequent itemset mining approach. To this end, the apriori algorithm is modified and is customized for similarity search problem. Modeling the similarity search problem as a frequent pattern mining problem, using a modified version of apriori, and dynamic selection the minimum support threshold are the most important advantages of the proposed method, which lead to its appropriate execution time and high quality results. The proposed method finds similar documents in less time than the combined method and MCVM method because it generates fewer candidate pairs for finding similar documents. Furthermore, experimental results show the high quality of the answers of the proposed methods.

Graph-based biomedical text summarization: An itemset mining and sentence clustering approach

ObjectiveAutomatic text summarization offers an efficient solution to access the ever-growing amounts of both scientific and clinical literature in the biomedical domain by summarizing the source documents while maintaining their most informative contents. In this paper, we propose a novel graph-based summarization method that takes advantage of the domain-specific knowledge and a well-established data mining technique called frequent itemset mining. MethodsOur summarizer exploits the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) to construct a concept-based model of the source document and mapping the document to the concepts. Then, it discovers frequent itemsets to take the correlations among multiple concepts into account. The method uses these correlations to propose a similarity function based on which a represented graph is constructed. The summarizer then employs a minimum spanning tree based clustering algorithm to discover various subthemes of the document. Eventually, it generates the final summary by selecting the most informative and relative sentences from all subthemes within the text. ResultsWe perform an automatic evaluation over a large number of summaries using the Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation (ROUGE) metrics. The results demonstrate that the proposed summarization system outperforms various baselines and benchmark approaches. ConclusionThe carried out research suggests that the incorporation of domain-specific knowledge and frequent itemset mining equips the summarization system in a better way to address the informativeness measurement of the sentences. Moreover, clustering the graph nodes (sentences) can enable the summarizer to target different main subthemes of a source document efficiently. The evaluation results show that the proposed approach can significantly improve the performance of the summarization systems in the biomedical domain.

Extracting useful knowledge from event logs: A frequent itemset mining approach

Business process analysis is a key activity that aims at increasing the efficiency of business operations. In recent years, several data mining based methods have been designed for discovering interesting patterns in event logs. A popular type of methods consists of applying frequent itemset mining to extract patterns indicating how resources and activities are frequently used. Although these methods are useful, they have two important limitations. First, these methods are designed to be applied to original event logs. Because these methods do not consider other perspectives on the data that could be obtained by applying data transformations, many patterns are missed that may represent important information for businesses. Second, these methods can generate a large number of patterns since they only consider the minimum support as constraint to select patterns. But analyzing a large number of patterns is time-consuming for users, and many irrelevant patterns may be found. To address these issues, this paper presents an improved event log analysis approach named AllMining. It includes a novel pre-processing method to construct multiple types of transaction databases from a same original event log using transformations. This allows to extract many new useful types of patterns from event logs with frequent itemset mining techniques. To address the second issue, a pruning strategy is further developed based on a novel concept of pattern coverage, to present a small set of patterns that covers many events to decision makers. Results of experiments on real-life event logs show that the proposed approach is promising compared to existing frequent itemset mining approaches and state-of-the-art process model algorithms.

A survey of itemset mining

Itemset mining is an important subfield of data mining, which consists of discovering interesting and useful patterns in transaction databases. The traditional task of frequent itemset mining is to discover groups of items (itemsets) that appear frequently together in transactions made by customers. Although itemset mining was designed for market basket analysis, it can be viewed more generally as the task of discovering groups of attribute values frequently cooccurring in databases. Because of its numerous applications in domains such as bioinformatics, text mining, product recommendation, e‐learning, and web click stream analysis, itemset mining has become a popular research area. This study provides an up‐to‐date survey that can serve both as an introduction and as a guide to recent advances and opportunities in the field. The problem of frequent itemset mining and its applications are described. Moreover, main approaches and strategies to solve itemset mining problems are presented, as well as their characteristics are provided. Limitations of traditional frequent itemset mining approaches are also highlighted, and extensions of the task of itemset mining are presented such as high‐utility itemset mining, rare itemset mining, fuzzy itemset mining, and uncertain itemset mining. This study also discusses research opportunities and the relationship to other popular pattern mining problems, such as sequential pattern mining, episode mining, subgraph mining, and association rule mining. Main open‐source libraries of itemset mining implementations are also briefly presented.WIREs Data Mining Knowl Discov2017, 7:e1207. doi: 10.1002/widm.1207This article is categorized under:Algorithmic Development > Association RulesTechnologies > Association Rules

A formal series-based unification of the frequent itemset mining approaches

Over the last two decades, a great deal of work has been devoted to the algorithmic aspects of the frequent itemset (FI) mining problem, leading to a phenomenal number of algorithms and associated implementations, each of which claims supremacy. Meanwhile, it is generally well agreed that developing a unifying theory is one of the most important issues in data mining research. Hence, our primary motivation for this work is to introduce a high-level formalism for this basic problem, which induces a unified vision of the algorithmic approaches presented so far. The key distinctive feature of the introduced model is that it combines, in one fashion, both the qualitative and the quantitative aspects of this basic problem. In this paper, we propose a new model for the FI-mining task based on formal series. In fact, we encode the itemsets as words over a sorted alphabet and express this problem by a formal series over the counting semiring $$(\mathbb N,+,\times ,0,1)$$(N,+,×,0,1), whose range represents the itemsets, and the coefficients are their supports. The aim is threefold: First, to define a clear, unified and extensible theoretical framework through which we can state the main FI-approaches. Second, to prove a convenient connection between the determinization of the acyclic weighted automaton that represents a transaction dataset and the computation of the associated collection of FI. Finally, to devise a first algorithmic transcription, baptized Wafi, of our model by means of weighted automata, which we evaluate against representative leading algorithms. The obtained results show the suitability of our formalism.

A Market-Basket Approach to Predict the Acute Aquatic Toxicity of Munitions and Energetic Materials.

An ongoing challenge in chemical production, including the production of insensitive munitions and energetics, is the ability to make predictions about potential environmental hazards early in the process. To address this challenge, a quantitative structure activity relationship model was developed to predict acute fathead minnow toxicity of insensitive munitions and energetic materials. Computational predictive toxicology models like this one may be used to identify and prioritize environmentally safer materials early in their development. The developed model is based on the Apriori market-basket/frequent itemset mining approach to identify probabilistic prediction rules using chemical atom-pairs and the lethality data for 57 compounds from a fathead minnow acute toxicity assay. Lethality data were discretized into four categories based on the Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals. Apriori identified toxicophores for categories two and three. The model classified 32 of the 57 compounds correctly, with a fivefold cross-validation classification rate of 74 %. A structure-based surrogate approach classified the remaining 25 chemicals correctly at 48 %. This result is unsurprising as these 25 chemicals were fairly unique within the larger set.