Data Mining:

Concepts and Techniques

(3rd ed.)

— Chapter 6 —

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May 10, 2021 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 2
Chapter 5: Mining Frequent Patterns, Association
and Correlations: Basic Concepts and Methods

 Basic Concepts

 Frequent Itemset Mining Methods

 Which Patterns Are Interesting?—Pattern

Evaluation Methods

 Summary

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 What Is Frequent Pattern Analysis?
 Frequent pattern: a pattern (a set of items, subsequences, substructures,
etc.) that occurs frequently in a data set
 First proposed by Agrawal, Imielinski, and Swami [AIS93] in the context
of frequent itemsets and association rule mining
 Motivation: Finding inherent regularities in data
 What products were often purchased together?— Beer and diapers?!
 What are the subsequent purchases after buying a PC?
 What kinds of DNA are sensitive to this new drug?
 Can we automatically classify web documents?
 Applications
 Basket data analysis, cross-marketing, catalog design, sale campaign
analysis, Web log (click stream) analysis, and DNA sequence analysis.
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 Why Is Freq. Pattern Mining Important?

 Freq. pattern: An intrinsic and important property of

datasets
 Foundation for many essential data mining tasks
 Association, correlation, and causality analysis

 Sequential, structural (e.g., sub-graph) patterns

 Pattern analysis in spatiotemporal, multimedia, time-

series, and stream data

 Classification: discriminative, frequent pattern analysis

 Cluster analysis: frequent pattern-based clustering

 Data warehousing: iceberg cube and cube-gradient

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 Basic Concepts: Frequent Itemset

Tid Items bought  itemset: A set of one or more

10 Beer, Nuts, Diaper items
20 Beer, Coffee, Diaper  k-itemset X = {x1, …, xk}
30 Beer, Diaper, Eggs
 (absolute) support, or, support
40 Nuts, Eggs, Milk count of X: Frequency or
50 Nuts, Coffee, Diaper, Eggs, Milk occurrence of an itemset X
Customer Customer
 (relative) support, s, is the
buys both buys diaper fraction of transactions that
contains X (i.e., the probability
that a transaction contains X)
 An itemset X is frequent if X’s
support is no less than a minsup
Customer
buys beer
threshold

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 Basic Concepts: Association Rules
Tid Items bought  Find all the rules X  Y with
10 Beer, Nuts, Diaper
minimum support and confidence
20 Beer, Coffee, Diaper
30 Beer, Diaper, Eggs  support, s, probability that a
40 Nuts, Eggs, Milk transaction contains X  Y
50 Nuts, Coffee, Diaper, Eggs, Milk
 confidence, c, conditional
probability that a transaction
Customer Customer
buys both
having X also contains Y
buys
diaper
Let minsup = 50%, minconf = 50%
Freq. Pat.: Beer:3, Nuts:3, Diaper:4, Eggs:3,
Customer {Beer, Diaper}:3
buys beer  Association rules: (many more!)
 Beer  Diaper (60%, 100%)
 Diaper  Beer (60%, 75%)
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 Compute Support and Confidence

May 10, 2021 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 8

 Closed Patterns and Max-Patterns
 A long pattern contains a combinatorial number of sub-
patterns, e.g., {a1, …, a100} contains (1001) + (1002) + … +
(110000) = 2100 – 1 = 1.27*1030 sub-patterns!
 Solution: Mine closed patterns and max-patterns instead
 An itemset X is closed if X is frequent and there exists no
super-pattern Y ⸦ X, with the same support as X
(proposed by Pasquier, et al. @ ICDT’99)
 An itemset X is a max-pattern if X is frequent and there
exists no frequent super-pattern Y ⸦ X(proposed by
Bayardo @ SIGMOD’98)
 Closed pattern is a lossless compression of freq. patterns
 Reducing the # of patterns and rules
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 Closed Patterns and Max-Patterns
 Exercise. DB = {<a1, …, a100>, < a1, …, a50>}
 Min_sup = 1.
 What is the set of closed itemset?
 <a1, …, a100>: 1
 < a1, …, a50>: 2
 What is the set of max-pattern?
 <a1, …, a100>: 1
 What is the set of all patterns?
 !!
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Chapter 5: Mining Frequent Patterns, Association
and Correlations: Basic Concepts and Methods

 Basic Concepts

 Frequent Itemset Mining Methods

 Which Patterns Are Interesting?—Pattern

Evaluation Methods

 Summary

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Scalable Frequent Itemset Mining Methods

 Apriori: A Candidate Generation-and-Test

Approach

 Mining Close Frequent Patterns and Maxpatterns

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The Downward Closure Property and Scalable
Mining Methods
 The downward closure property of frequent patterns
 Any subset of a frequent itemset must be frequent

 If {beer, diaper, nuts} is frequent, so is {beer,

diaper}
 i.e., every transaction having {beer, diaper, nuts} also

contains {beer, diaper}

 Scalable mining methods: Three major approaches
 Apriori (Agrawal & Srikant@VLDB’94)

 Freq. pattern growth (FPgrowth—Han, Pei & Yin

@SIGMOD’00)
 Vertical data format approach (Charm—Zaki & Hsiao

@SDM’02)
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Apriori: A Candidate Generation & Test Approach

 Apriori pruning principle: If there is any itemset which is

infrequent, its superset should not be generated/tested!
(Agrawal & Srikant @VLDB’94, Mannila, et al. @ KDD’ 94)
 Method:
 Initially, scan DB once to get frequent 1-itemset
 Generate length (k+1) candidate itemsets from length k
frequent itemsets
 Test the candidates against DB
 Terminate when no frequent or candidate set can be
generated

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 The Apriori Algorithm—An Example
Supmin = 2 Itemset sup
Itemset sup
Database TDB {A} 2
Tid Items
L1 {A} 2
C1 {B} 3
{B} 3
10 A, C, D {C} 3
1st scan {C} 3
20 B, C, E {D} 1
{E} 3
30 A, B, C, E {E} 3
40 B, E
C2 Itemset sup C2 Itemset
{A, B} 1
L2 Itemset sup 2nd scan {A, B}
{A, C} 2
{A, C} 2 {A, C}
{A, E} 1
{B, C} 2
{B, C} 2 {A, E}
{B, E} 3
{B, E} 3 {B, C}
{C, E} 2
{C, E} 2 {B, E}
{C, E}

C3 Itemset L3 Itemset sup

3rd scan
{B, C, E} {B, C, E} 2
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 Finding the Association Rules
Itemset sup
{B, C, E} 2

May 10, 2021 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 16

The Apriori Algorithm (Pseudo-Code)
Ck: Candidate itemset of size k
Lk : frequent itemset of size k

L1 = {frequent items};
for (k = 1; Lk !=; k++) do begin
Ck+1 = candidates generated from Lk;
for each transaction t in database do
increment the count of all candidates in Ck+1 that
are contained in t
Lk+1 = candidates in Ck+1 with min_support
end
return k Lk;
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Chapter 5: Mining Frequent Patterns, Association
and Correlations: Basic Concepts and Methods

 Basic Concepts

 Frequent Itemset Mining Methods

 Which Patterns Are Interesting?—Pattern

Evaluation Methods

 Summary

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 Interestingness Measure: Correlations (Lift)
 play basketball  eat cereal [40%, 66.7%] is misleading
 The overall % of students eating cereal is 75% > 66.7%.
 play basketball  not eat cereal [20%, 33.3%] is more accurate,
although with lower support and confidence
 Measure of dependent/correlated events: lift

P( A B) Basketball Not basketball Sum (row)

lift  Cereal 2000 1750 3750
P( A) P( B)
Not cereal 1000 250 1250
2000 / 5000
lift( B, C )   0.89 Sum(col.) 3000 2000 5000
3000 / 5000 * 3750 / 5000
1000 / 5000
lift( B, C )   1.33
3000 / 5000 *1250 / 5000

 lift>=1 Accept rule, lift<1 Reject rule

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 Are lift and 2 Good Measures of Correlation?

 “Buy walnuts  buy

milk [1%, 80%]” is
misleading if 85% of
customers buy milk
 Support and confidence
are not good to indicate
correlations
 Over 20 interestingness
measures have been
proposed (see Tan,
Kumar, Sritastava
@KDD’02)
 Which are good ones?

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Chapter 5: Mining Frequent Patterns, Association
and Correlations: Basic Concepts and Methods

 Basic Concepts

 Frequent Itemset Mining Methods

 Which Patterns Are Interesting?—Pattern

Evaluation Methods

 Summary

21
 Summary

 Basic concepts: association rules, support-

confident framework, closed and max-patterns
 Scalable frequent pattern mining methods
 Apriori (Candidate generation & test)
 Which patterns are interesting?
 Pattern evaluation methods

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Ref: Basic Concepts of Frequent Pattern Mining

 (Association Rules) R. Agrawal, T. Imielinski, and A. Swami. Mining

association rules between sets of items in large databases.
SIGMOD'93.
 (Max-pattern) R. J. Bayardo. Efficiently mining long patterns from
databases. SIGMOD'98.
 (Closed-pattern) N. Pasquier, Y. Bastide, R. Taouil, and L. Lakhal.
Discovering frequent closed itemsets for association rules. ICDT'99.
 (Sequential pattern) R. Agrawal and R. Srikant. Mining sequential
patterns. ICDE'95

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 Ref: Apriori and Its Improvements

 R. Agrawal and R. Srikant. Fast algorithms for mining association rules.

VLDB'94.
 H. Mannila, H. Toivonen, and A. I. Verkamo. Efficient algorithms for
discovering association rules. KDD'94.
 A. Savasere, E. Omiecinski, and S. Navathe. An efficient algorithm for
mining association rules in large databases. VLDB'95.
 J. S. Park, M. S. Chen, and P. S. Yu. An effective hash-based algorithm
for mining association rules. SIGMOD'95.
 H. Toivonen. Sampling large databases for association rules. VLDB'96.
 S. Brin, R. Motwani, J. D. Ullman, and S. Tsur. Dynamic itemset
counting and implication rules for market basket analysis. SIGMOD'97.
 S. Sarawagi, S. Thomas, and R. Agrawal. Integrating association rule
mining with relational database systems: Alternatives and implications.
SIGMOD'98.
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Ref: Depth-First, Projection-Based FP Mining
 R. Agarwal, C. Aggarwal, and V. V. V. Prasad. A tree projection algorithm for
generation of frequent itemsets. J. Parallel and Distributed Computing:02.
 J. Han, J. Pei, and Y. Yin. Mining frequent patterns without candidate
generation. SIGMOD’ 00.
 J. Liu, Y. Pan, K. Wang, and J. Han. Mining Frequent Item Sets by
Opportunistic Projection. KDD'02.
 J. Han, J. Wang, Y. Lu, and P. Tzvetkov. Mining Top-K Frequent Closed
Patterns without Minimum Support. ICDM'02.
 J. Wang, J. Han, and J. Pei. CLOSET+: Searching for the Best Strategies for
Mining Frequent Closed Itemsets. KDD'03.
 G. Liu, H. Lu, W. Lou, J. X. Yu. On Computing, Storing and Querying Frequent
Patterns. KDD'03.
 G. Grahne and J. Zhu, Efficiently Using Prefix-Trees in Mining Frequent
Itemsets, Proc. ICDM'03 Int. Workshop on Frequent Itemset Mining
Implementations (FIMI'03), Melbourne, FL, Nov. 2003
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 Ref: Vertical Format and Row Enumeration Methods

 M. J. Zaki, S. Parthasarathy, M. Ogihara, and W. Li. Parallel algorithm

for discovery of association rules. DAMI:97.
 Zaki and Hsiao. CHARM: An Efficient Algorithm for Closed Itemset
Mining, SDM'02.
 C. Bucila, J. Gehrke, D. Kifer, and W. White. DualMiner: A Dual-
Pruning Algorithm for Itemsets with Constraints. KDD’02.
 F. Pan, G. Cong, A. K. H. Tung, J. Yang, and M. Zaki , CARPENTER:
Finding Closed Patterns in Long Biological Datasets. KDD'03.
 H. Liu, J. Han, D. Xin, and Z. Shao, Mining Interesting Patterns from
Very High Dimensional Data: A Top-Down Row Enumeration
Approach, SDM'06.

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Ref: Mining Correlations and Interesting Rules

 M. Klemettinen, H. Mannila, P. Ronkainen, H. Toivonen, and A. I.

Verkamo. Finding interesting rules from large sets of discovered
association rules. CIKM'94.
 S. Brin, R. Motwani, and C. Silverstein. Beyond market basket:
Generalizing association rules to correlations. SIGMOD'97.
 C. Silverstein, S. Brin, R. Motwani, and J. Ullman. Scalable
techniques for mining causal structures. VLDB'98.
 P.-N. Tan, V. Kumar, and J. Srivastava. Selecting the Right
Interestingness Measure for Association Patterns. KDD'02.
 E. Omiecinski. Alternative Interest Measures for Mining
Associations. TKDE’03.
 T. Wu, Y. Chen and J. Han, “Association Mining in Large Databases:
A Re-Examination of Its Measures”, PKDD'07
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 Ref: Freq. Pattern Mining Applications

 Y. Huhtala, J. Kärkkäinen, P. Porkka, H. Toivonen. Efficient

Discovery of Functional and Approximate Dependencies Using
Partitions. ICDE’98.
 H. V. Jagadish, J. Madar, and R. Ng. Semantic Compression and
Pattern Extraction with Fascicles. VLDB'99.
 T. Dasu, T. Johnson, S. Muthukrishnan, and V. Shkapenyuk.
Mining Database Structure; or How to Build a Data Quality
Browser. SIGMOD'02.
 K. Wang, S. Zhou, J. Han. Profit Mining: From Patterns to Actions.
EDBT’02.

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May 10, 2021 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 29