Efficient algorithms for mining colossal patterns in high dimensional databases

Mining association rules plays an important role in decision support systems. To mine strong association rules, it is necessary to mine frequent patterns. There are many algorithms that have been developed to efficiently mine frequent patterns, such as Apriori, Eclat, FP-Growth, PrePost, and FIN. However, these are only efficient with a small number of items in the database. When a database has a large number of items (from thousands to hundreds of thousands) but the number of transactions is small, these algorithms cannot run when the minimum support threshold is also small (because the search space is huge). This thus causes the problem of mining colossal patterns in high dimensional databases. In 2012, Sohrabi and Barforoush proposed the BVBUC algorithm for mining colossal patterns based on a bottom-up scheme. However, this needs more time to check subsets and supersets, because it generates a lot of candidates and consumes more memory to store these. In this paper we propose new, efficient algorithms for mining colossal patterns. Firstly, the CP (Colossal Pattern)-tree is designed. Next, we develop two theorems to rapidly compute patterns of nodes and prune nodes without the loss of information in colossal patterns. Based on the CP-tree and these theorems, an algorithm (named CP-Miner) is proposed to solve the problem of mining colossal patterns. A sorting strategy for efficiently mining colossal patterns is thus developed. This strategy helps to reduce the number of significant candidates and the time needed to check subsets and supersets. The PCP-Miner algorithm, which uses this strategy, is then proposed, and we also conduct experiments to show the efficiency of these algorithms.