Novel parallel method for association rule mining on multi-core shared memory systems

Association rule mining (ARM) is an important task in data mining with many practical applications. Current methods for association rule mining have shown unstable performance for different database types and under-utilize the benefits of multi-core shared memory machines. In this paper, we address these issues by presenting a novel parallel method for finding frequent patterns, the most computational intensive phase of ARM. Our proposed method, named ShaFEM, combines two mining strategies and applies the most appropriate one to each data subset of the database to efficiently adapt to the data characteristics and run fast on both sparse and dense databases. In addition, our newlock-free design minimizes the synchronization needs and maximizes the data independence to enhance the scalability. The new structure lends itself well to dynamic job scheduling resulting in a well-balanced load on the new multi-core shared memory architectures. We have evaluated ShaFEM on 12-core multi-socket servers and found that our method run up to 5.8 times faster and consumes memory up to 7.1 times less than the state-of-the-art parallel method. For some test cases, ShaFEM can save up to 4.9 days of execution time over the compared method.