Finding Frequent Patterns Using Length-Decreasing Support Constraints

摘要

Finding prevalent patterns in large amount of data has been one of the major problems in the area of data mining. Particularly, the problem of finding frequent itemset or sequential patterns in very large databases has been studied extensively over the years, and a variety of algorithms have been developed for each problem. The key feature in most of these algorithms is that they use a constant support constraint to control the inherently exponential complexity of these two problems. In general, patterns that contain only a few items will tend to be interesting if they have a high support, whereas long patterns can still be interesting even if their support is relatively small. Ideally, we want to find all the frequent patterns whose support decreases as a function of their length without having to find many uninteresting infrequent short patterns. Developing such algorithms is particularly challenging because the downward closure property of the constant support constraint cannot be used to prune short infrequent patterns.