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apriori: Frequent itemsets via the

Apriori algorithm

Overview

References apriori: Frequent itemsets via the Apriori algorithm

Related
Apriori function to extract frequent itemsets for association rule mining
Example 1 -- Generating Frequent
Itemsets
from mlxtend.frequent_patterns import apriori
Example 2 -- Selecting and Filtering
Results

Example 3 -- Working with Sparse

Representations

Overview
API

Apriori is a popular algorithm [1] for extracting frequent itemsets with applications in association rule
learning. The apriori algorithm has been designed to operate on databases containing transactions, such as
purchases by customers of a store. An itemset is considered as "frequent" if it meets a user-specified support
threshold. For instance, if the support threshold is set to 0.5 (50%), a frequent itemset is defined as a set of
items that occur together in at least 50% of all transactions in the database.

References
[1] Agrawal, Rakesh, and Ramakrishnan Srikant. "Fast algorithms for mining association rules." Proc. 20th int.
conf. very large data bases, VLDB. Vol. 1215. 1994.

Related
FP-Growth
FP-Max

Example 1 -- Generating Frequent Itemsets

The apriori function expects data in a one-hot encoded pandas DataFrame. Suppose we have the following
transaction data:

dataset = [['Milk', 'Onion', 'Nutmeg', 'Kidney Beans', 'Eggs', 'Yogurt'],

['Dill', 'Onion', 'Nutmeg', 'Kidney Beans', 'Eggs', 'Yogurt'],
['Milk', 'Apple', 'Kidney Beans', 'Eggs'],
['Milk', 'Unicorn', 'Corn', 'Kidney Beans', 'Yogurt'],
['Corn', 'Onion', 'Onion', 'Kidney Beans', 'Ice cream', 'Eggs']]

We can transform it into the right format via the TransactionEncoder as follows:

import pandas as pd
from mlxtend.preprocessing import TransactionEncoder

te = TransactionEncoder()
te_ary = te.fit(dataset).transform(dataset)
df = pd.DataFrame(te_ary, columns=te.columns_)
df

Apple Corn Dill Eggs Ice cream Kidney Beans Milk Nutmeg Onion Unicorn Yogurt

0 False False False True False True True True True False True

1 False False True True False True False True True False True

2 True False False True False True True False False False False

3 False True False False False True True False False True True

4 False True False True True True False False True False False

Now, let us return the items and itemsets with at least 60% support:

from mlxtend.frequent_patterns import apriori

apriori(df, min_support=0.6)
 support itemsets

0 0.8 (3)

1 1.0 (5)

2 0.6 (6)

3 0.6 (8)

4 0.6 (10)

5 0.8 (3, 5)

6 0.6 (8, 3)

7 0.6 (5, 6)

8 0.6 (8, 5)

9 0.6 (10, 5)

10 0.6 (8, 3, 5)

By default, apriori returns the column indices of the items, which may be useful in downstream operations
such as association rule mining. For better readability, we can set use_colnames=True to convert these
integer values into the respective item names:

apriori(df, min_support=0.6, use_colnames=True)

support itemsets

0 0.8 (Eggs)

1 1.0 (Kidney Beans)

2 0.6 (Milk)

3 0.6 (Onion)

4 0.6 (Yogurt)

5 0.8 (Eggs, Kidney Beans)

6 0.6 (Eggs, Onion)

7 0.6 (Kidney Beans, Milk)

8 0.6 (Kidney Beans, Onion)

9 0.6 (Yogurt, Kidney Beans)

10 0.6 (Kidney Beans, Eggs, Onion)

Example 2 -- Selecting and Filtering Results

The advantage of working with pandas DataFrames is that we can use its convenient features to filter the
results. For instance, let's assume we are only interested in itemsets of length 2 that have a support of at
least 80 percent. First, we create the frequent itemsets via apriori and add a new column that stores the
length of each itemset:

frequent_itemsets = apriori(df, min_support=0.6, use_colnames=True)

frequent_itemsets['length'] = frequent_itemsets['itemsets'].apply(lambda x: len(x))
frequent_itemsets

support itemsets length

0 0.8 (Eggs) 1

1 1.0 (Kidney Beans) 1

2 0.6 (Milk) 1

3 0.6 (Onion) 1

4 0.6 (Yogurt) 1

5 0.8 (Eggs, Kidney Beans) 2

6 0.6 (Eggs, Onion) 2

7 0.6 (Kidney Beans, Milk) 2

8 0.6 (Kidney Beans, Onion) 2

9 0.6 (Yogurt, Kidney Beans) 2

10 0.6 (Kidney Beans, Eggs, Onion) 3

Then, we can select the results that satisfy our desired criteria as follows:
 frequent_itemsets[ (frequent_itemsets['length'] == 2) &
(frequent_itemsets['support'] >= 0.8) ]

support itemsets length

5 0.8 (Eggs, Kidney Beans) 2

Similarly, using the Pandas API, we can select entries based on the "itemsets" column:

frequent_itemsets[ frequent_itemsets['itemsets'] == {'Onion', 'Eggs'} ]

support itemsets length

6 0.6 (Eggs, Onion) 2

Frozensets

Note that the entries in the "itemsets" column are of type frozenset , which is built-in Python type that is
similar to a Python set but immutable, which makes it more efficient for certain query or comparison
operations (https://docs.python.org/3.6/library/stdtypes.html#frozenset). Since frozenset s are sets, the
item order does not matter. I.e., the query

frequent_itemsets[ frequent_itemsets['itemsets'] == {'Onion', 'Eggs'} ]

is equivalent to any of the following three

frequent_itemsets[ frequent_itemsets['itemsets'] == {'Eggs', 'Onion'} ]

frequent_itemsets[ frequent_itemsets['itemsets'] == frozenset(('Eggs', 'Onion')) ]
frequent_itemsets[ frequent_itemsets['itemsets'] == frozenset(('Onion', 'Eggs')) ]

Example 3 -- Working with Sparse Representations

To save memory, you may want to represent your transaction data in the sparse format. This is especially
useful if you have lots of products and small transactions.

oht_ary = te.fit(dataset).transform(dataset, sparse=True)

sparse_df = pd.DataFrame.sparse.from_spmatrix(oht_ary, columns=te.columns_)
sparse_df

Apple Corn Dill Eggs Ice cream Kidney Beans Milk Nutmeg Onion Unicorn Yogurt

0 False False False True False True True True True False True

1 False False True True False True False True True False True

2 True False False True False True True False False False False

3 False True False False False True True False False True True

4 False True False True True True False False True False False

apriori(sparse_df, min_support=0.6, use_colnames=True, verbose=1)

Processing 21 combinations | Sampling itemset size 3

support itemsets

0 0.8 (Eggs)

1 1.0 (Kidney Beans)

2 0.6 (Milk)

3 0.6 (Onion)

4 0.6 (Yogurt)

5 0.8 (Eggs, Kidney Beans)

6 0.6 (Eggs, Onion)

7 0.6 (Kidney Beans, Milk)

8 0.6 (Kidney Beans, Onion)

9 0.6 (Yogurt, Kidney Beans)

10 0.6 (Kidney Beans, Eggs, Onion)

API
apriori(df, min_support=0.5, use_colnames=False, max_len=None, verbose=0, low_memory=False)

Get frequent itemsets from a one-hot DataFrame

Parameters

df : pandas DataFrame

pandas DataFrame the encoded format. Also supports DataFrames with sparse data; for more info,
please see (https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/ user_guide/sparse.html#sparse-data-
structures)

Please note that the old pandas SparseDataFrame format is no longer supported in mlxtend >= 0.17.2.

The allowed values are either 0/1 or True/False. For example,

Apple Bananas Beer Chicken Milk Rice

0 True False True True False True
1 True False True False False True
2 True False True False False False
3 True True False False False False
4 False False True True True True
5 False False True False True True
6 False False True False True False
7 True True False False False False

min_support : float (default: 0.5)

A float between 0 and 1 for minumum support of the itemsets returned. The support is computed as
the fraction transactions_where_item(s)_occur / total_transactions .

use_colnames : bool (default: False)

If True , uses the DataFrames' column names in the returned DataFrame instead of column indices.

max_len : int (default: None)

Maximum length of the itemsets generated. If None (default) all possible itemsets lengths (under the
apriori condition) are evaluated.

verbose : int (default: 0)

Shows the number of iterations if >= 1 and low_memory is True . If

=1 and low_memory is False , shows the number of combinations.

low_memory : bool (default: False)

If True , uses an iterator to search for combinations above min_support . Note that while
low_memory=True should only be used for large dataset if memory resources are limited, because this
implementation is approx. 3-6x slower than the default.

Returns

pandas DataFrame with columns ['support', 'itemsets'] of all itemsets that are >= min_support and < than
max_len (if max_len is not None). Each itemset in the 'itemsets' column is of type frozenset , which is a
Python built-in type that behaves similarly to sets except that it is immutable (For more info, see
https://docs.python.org/3.6/library/stdtypes.html#frozenset).

Examples

For usage examples, please see http://rasbt.github.io/mlxtend/user_guide/frequent_patterns/apriori/

Copyright © 2014-2020 Sebastian Raschka

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