Title: MCFPTree: An FP-tree-based algorithm for multi-constraint patterns discovery

Authors: Wen-Yang Lin, Ko-Wei Huang, Chin-Ang Wu

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National University of Kaohsiung, Kaohsiung 811, Taiwan, ROC. ' Institute of Computer and Communication Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan 701, Taiwan, ROC. ' Institute of Information Engineering, I-Shou University, Kaohsiung 840, Taiwan, ROC

Abstract: In this paper, the problem of constraint-based pattern discovery is investigated. By allowing more user-specified constraints other than traditional rule measurements, e.g., minimum support and minimum confidence, research work on this topic endeavoured to reflect real interest of analysts and relieve them from the overabundance of rules. Surprisingly, very little research has been conducted to deal with multiple types of constraints. In our previous work, we have studied this problem, specifically focusing on three different types of constraints, and an efficient apriori-like algorithm, called MCFP, is proposed. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm called MCFPTree, which is based on a tree structure for keeping frequent patterns without suffering from the problem of candidate itemsets generation. Experimental results show that our MCFPTree algorithm is significantly faster than MCFP and an intuitive method FP-Growth+, i.e., post-processing the frequent patterns generated by FP-Growth, against user-specified constraints.

Keywords: multi-constraint pattern mining; item constraints; aggregation constraints; FP-tree; pattern discovery; frequent patterns.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIDM.2010.033360

International Journal of Business Intelligence and Data Mining, 2010 Vol.5 No.3, pp.231 - 246

Published online: 01 Jun 2010 *

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