Università degli Studi di Milano
Master Degree in Computer Science
Information Management
course
Teacher: Alberto Ceselli
Lecture 15: 25/11/2014
Data Mining:
Concepts and
Techniques
(3rd ed.)
— Chapter 6 —
Jiawei Han, Micheline Kamber, and Jian Pei
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign &
Simon Fraser University
©2011 Han, Kamber & Pei. All rights reserved.
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
3
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 (1993) 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 ..., Web log (click stream)
analysis, and DNA sequence analysis. 4
Basic Concepts: Frequent
Patterns
Tid Items bought itemset: A set of one or
10 Beer, Nuts, Diaper more items
20 Beer, Coffee, Diaper k-itemset X = {x1, …, xk}
30 Beer, Diaper, Eggs
40 Nuts, Eggs, Milk
(absolute) support, or,
50 Nuts, Coffee, Diaper, Eggs,
support count of X: number
Milk of occurrences of an itemset
Customer X in the dataset
Customer
buys both buys diaper (relative) support, s, is the
fraction of transactions that
contains X (i.e., the
probability that a
transaction contains X)
Customer
buys beer
An itemset X is frequent if
X’s support is no less than a
minsup threshold 6
Basic Concepts: Association Rules
Tid Items bought Find all the rules X Y fixing
10 Beer, Nuts, Diaper
a minimum support and
20 Beer, Coffee, Diaper
30 Beer, Diaper, Eggs confidence
40 Nuts, Eggs, Milk support, s, probability that
50 Nuts, Coffee, Diaper, Eggs, Milk
a transaction contains X
Customer
Customer Y
buys both
buys
diaper
confidence, c, conditional
probability that a
transaction having X also
Customer contains Y
buys beer
Let minsup = 50%, minconf = 50% Association rules: (many more!)
Freq. Pat.: Beer:3, Nuts:3, Diaper:4, Beer Diaper (60%, 100%)
Eggs:3, {Beer, Diaper}:3
Diaper Beer (60%, 75%)
7
Closed Patterns and Max-
Patterns
A (long) pattern contains a combinatorial number
of sub-patterns, e.g., {a1, …, a100} contains
( )( ) ( )
100 + 100 +...+ 100 =2100−1=1.27⋅1030
1 2 100
sub-patterns!
Idea: restrict to closed and maximal patterns
An itemset X is a closed p. if X is frequent and
there exists no super-pattern Y ⊃ X, with the
same support as X
An itemset X is a maximal p. if X is frequent and
there exists no super-pattern Y ⊃ X, which is
also frequent
Closed pattern is a lossless compression of freq.
Patterns: reducing the # of patterns and rules 8
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 maximal pattern?
<a1, …, a100>: 1
What is the set of all patterns? !!
9
Computational Complexity of Frequent
Itemset Mining
How many itemsets are potentially to be generated in the worst
case?
The number of frequent itemsets to be generated is sensitive
to the minsup threshold
When minsup is low, there exist potentially an exponential
number of frequent itemsets
The worst case: MN where M: # distinct items, and N: max
length of transactions
The worst case complexty vs. the expected probability
Ex. Suppose Amazon has 104 kinds of products
The chance to pick up one product 10-4
The chance to pick up a particular set of 10 products: ~10-
40
What is the chance this particular set of 10 products to be
frequent (e.g. 103 times in 109 transactions)? 10
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
11
Scalable Frequent Itemset Mining
Methods
Apriori: Candidate Generate&Test Approach
Improving the Efficiency of Apriori
FPGrowth: A Frequent Pattern-Growth
Approach
ECLAT: Frequent Pattern Mining with
Vertical Data Format
12
The Downward Closure Property and
Scalable Mining Methods
The downward closure property of frequent patterns
Any subset of a frequent itemset is 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)
13
Apriori: A Candidate Generate & 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 14
The Apriori Algorithm—An Example
Supmin = 2 Itemset sup
Itemset sup
Database TDB {A} 2
L1 {A} 2
Tid Items C1 {B} 3
{B} 3
10 A, C, D {C} 3
20 B, C, E 1st scan {C} 3
{D} 1
{E} 3
30 A, B, C, E {E} 3
40 B, E
C2 Itemset sup C2 Itemset
L2 {A, B} 1
Itemset sup 2nd scan {A, B}
{A, C} 2 {A, C} 2
{A, C}
{B, C} 2 {A, E} 1
{A, E}
{B, E} 3 {B, C} 2
{B, C}
{C, E} 2 {B, E} 3
{B, E}
{C, E} 2
{C, E}
C3 Itemset
3rd scan L3 Itemset sup
{B, C, E} {B, C, E} 2
15
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 enough support
end
return k Lk; 16
Implementation of Apriori
How to generate candidates?
Step 1: self-joining Lk
Step 2: pruning
Example of Candidate-generation
L3={abc, abd, acd, ace, bcd}
Self-joining: L3*L3
abcd from abc and abd
acde from acd and ace
Pruning:
acde is removed because ade is not in L3
C4 = {abcd}
17
How to Count Supports of Candidates?
Why counting supports of candidates is a problem?
The total number of candidates can be huge
Each transaction may contain many candidates
Method:
Candidate itemsets are stored in a hash-tree
Leaf nodes of hash-tree contain a list of itemsets
and counts
Interior nodes contain a hash table
Subset function: finds all the candidates contained
in a transaction
18
Counting Supports of Candidates
Using Hash Tree
Subset function
Transaction: 1 2 3 5 6
3,6,9
1,4,7
2,5,8
1+2356
13+56 234
567
145 345 356 367
136 368
357
12+356
689
124
457 125 159
458
Build: store only frequent candidates and their count; do it
incrementally while building Lk
Query for a candidate: visit the tree;
Query for an itemset: perform a visit for each sub-itemset; 19
Generating Association Rules from
frequent itemsets
When all frequent itemsets are found, generate
strong association rules:
Pick each frequent itemset F, generate all its
nonempty subsets
For each such subset S, test the rule
S → (F \ S)
support(S → (F \ S)) is above the threshold (as F is
frequent by construction)
confidence (S → (F \ S)) = P( (F \ S) | S ) =
count(F) / count(S)
count(F) and count(S) are known, and so
checking is quick
20
Candidate Generation: An SQL
Implementation
SQL Implementation of candidate generation
Suppose the items in Lk-1 are listed in an order
Step 1: self-joining Lk-1
insert into Ck
select p.item1, p.item2, …, p.itemk-1, q.itemk-1
from Lk-1 p, Lk-1 q
where p.item1=q.item1, …, p.itemk-2=q.itemk-2, p.itemk-1 <
q.itemk-1
Step 2: pruning
forall itemsets c in Ck do
forall (k-1)-subsets s of c do
if (s is not in Lk-1) then delete c from Ck
Use object-relational extensions like UDFs, BLOBs, and Table
functions for efficient implementation [See: S. Sarawagi, S. Thomas,
and R. Agrawal. Integrating association rule mining with relational
database systems: Alternatives and implications. SIGMOD’98] 21
Scalable Frequent Itemset Mining
Methods
Apriori: A Candidate Generation-and-Test Approach
Improving the Efficiency of Apriori
FPGrowth: A Frequent Pattern-Growth Approach
ECLAT: Frequent Pattern Mining with Vertical Data
Format
Mining Close Frequent Patterns and Maxpatterns
22
Further Improvement of the Apriori Method
Major computational challenges
Multiple scans of transaction database
Huge number of candidates
Tedious workload of support counting for
candidates
Improving Apriori: general ideas
Reduce passes of transaction database scans
Shrink number of candidates
Facilitate support counting of candidates
23
Partition: Scan Database Only
Twice
Any itemset that is potentially frequent in DB must
be frequent in at least one of the partitions of DB
Scan 1: partition database and find local
frequent patterns
Scan 2: consolidate global frequent patterns
A. Savasere, E. Omiecinski and S. Navathe ’95
Sampling for Frequent Patterns
Select a sample of original database, mine
frequent patterns within sample using Apriori
Scan database once to verify frequent itemsets
found in sample, only borders of closure of
frequent patterns are checked
Example: check abcd instead of ab, ac, …, etc.
Scan database again to find missed frequent
patterns
H. Toivonen. Sampling large databases for
association rules. In VLDB’96
26
Dynamic Itemset Counting:
Reduce Number of Scans
ABCD
Once both A and D are determined
frequent, the counting of AD begins
ABC ABD ACD BCD Once all length-2 subsets of BCD are
determined frequent, the counting of
BCD begins
AB AC BC AD BD CD
Transactions
1-itemsets
A B C D
Apriori 2-itemsets
…
{}
Itemset lattice 1-itemsets
1st pass
2-items
S. Brin R. Motwani, J. Ullman,
and S. Tsur. Dynamic itemset DIC 3-items
counting and implication
2nd pass
rules for market basket data.
SIGMOD’97 27
