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.
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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

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 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 [AIS93] 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, catalog design, sale campaign
analysis, Web log (click stream) analysis, and DNA sequence analysis.
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 Why Is Freq. Pattern Mining Important?
 Freq. pattern: An intrinsic and important property of
datasets
 Foundation for many essential data mining tasks
 Association, correlation, and causality analysis

 Sequential, structural (e.g., sub-graph) patterns

 Pattern analysis in spatiotemporal, multimedia, time-

series, and stream data

 Classification: discriminative, frequent pattern analysis

 Cluster analysis: frequent pattern-based clustering

 Data warehousing: iceberg cube and cube-gradient

 Semantic data compression: fascicles

 Broad applications

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 Basic Concepts: Frequent Patterns

Tid Items bought  itemset: A set of one or more

10 Beer, Nuts, Diaper items
20 Beer, Coffee, Diaper  k-itemset X = {x1, …, xk}
30 Beer, Diaper, Eggs  (absolute) support, or, support
40 Nuts, Eggs, Milk
count of X: Frequency or
50 Nuts, Coffee, Diaper, Eggs, Milk
occurrence of an itemset X
Customer Customer
 (relative) support, s, is the
buys both buys diaper fraction of transactions that
contains X (i.e., the probability
that a transaction contains X)
 An itemset X is frequent if X’s
support is no less than a minsup
Customer
buys beer
threshold

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 Basic Concepts: Association Rules
Tid Items bought  Find all the rules X  Y with
10 Beer, Nuts, Diaper
20 Beer, Coffee, Diaper
minimum support and confidence
30 Beer, Diaper, Eggs  support, s, probability that a
40 Nuts, Eggs, Milk transaction contains X  Y
50 Nuts, Coffee, Diaper, Eggs, Milk
 confidence, c, conditional
Customer
buys both
Customer probability that a transaction
buys
diaper
having X also contains Y
Let minsup = 50%, minconf = 50%
Freq. Pat.: Beer:3, Nuts:3, Diaper:4, Eggs:3,
Customer {Beer, Diaper}:3
buys beer  Association rules: (many more!)
 Beer  Diaper (60%, 100%)
 Diaper  Beer (60%, 75%)
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 Closed Patterns and Max-Patterns
 A long pattern contains a combinatorial number of sub-
patterns, e.g., {a1, …, a100} contains (1001) + (1002) + … +
(110000) = 2100 – 1 = 1.27*1030 sub-patterns!
 Solution: Mine closed patterns and max-patterns instead
 An itemset X is closed if X is frequent and there exists no
super-pattern Y ‫ כ‬X, with the same support as X
(proposed by Pasquier, et al. @ ICDT’99)
 An itemset X is a max-pattern if X is frequent and there
exists no frequent super-pattern Y ‫ כ‬X (proposed by
Bayardo @ SIGMOD’98)
 Closed pattern is a lossless compression of freq. patterns
 Reducing the # of patterns and rules
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 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 max-pattern?
 <a1, …, a100>: 1
 What is the set of all patterns?
 !!
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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 senstive 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 Walmart 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
103 times in 109 transactions?

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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

10
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
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 The Downward Closure Property and Scalable
Mining Methods
 The downward closure property of frequent patterns
 Any subset of a frequent itemset must be 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)
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Apriori: A Candidate Generation & 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
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 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
1st scan {C} 3
20 B, C, E {D} 1
{E} 3
30 A, B, C, E {E} 3
40 B, E
C2 Itemset sup C2 Itemset
{A, B} 1
L2 Itemset sup
{A, C} 2
2nd scan {A, B}
{A, C} 2 {A, C}
{A, E} 1
{B, C} 2 {A, E}
{B, C} 2
{B, E} 3
{B, E} 3 {B, C}
{C, E} 2
{C, E} 2 {B, E}
{C, E}

C3 Itemset
3rd scan L3 Itemset sup
{B, C, E} {B, C, E} 2
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 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 min_support
end
return k Lk; 15
 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}
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 How to Count Supports of Candidates?

 Why counting supports of candidates a problem?

 The total number of candidates can be very huge
 One transaction may contain many candidates
 Method:
 Candidate itemsets are stored in a hash-tree
 Leaf node of hash-tree contains a list of itemsets and
counts
 Interior node contains a hash table
 Subset function: finds all the candidates contained in
a transaction
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 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

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 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

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 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, VLDB’95

DB1 + DB2 + + DBk = DB

sup1(i) < σDB1 sup2(i) < σDB2 supk(i) < σDBk sup(i) < σDB
 DHP: Reduce the Number of Candidates

 A k-itemset whose corresponding hashing bucket count is below the

threshold cannot be frequent count itemsets
 Candidates: a, b, c, d, e 35 {ab, ad, ae}
88 {bd, be, de}
 Hash entries
{ab, ad, ae}
.

.
. .
{bd, be, de}
.
 .

 … 102 {yz, qs, wt}

 Frequent 1-itemset: a, b, d, e Hash Table

 ab is not a candidate 2-itemset if the sum of count of {ab, ad, ae} is

below support threshold
 J. Park, M. Chen, and P. Yu. An effective hash-based algorithm for
mining association rules. SIGMOD’95
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 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

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Pattern-Growth Approach: Mining Frequent Patterns
Without Candidate Generation
 Bottlenecks of the Apriori approach
 Breadth-first (i.e., level-wise) search
 Candidate generation and test
 Often generates a huge number of candidates
 The FPGrowth Approach (J. Han, J. Pei, and Y. Yin, SIGMOD’ 00)
 Depth-first search
 Avoid explicit candidate generation
 Major philosophy: Grow long patterns from short ones using local
frequent items only
 “abc” is a frequent pattern
 Get all transactions having “abc”, i.e., project DB on abc: DB|abc
 “d” is a local frequent item in DB|abc  abcd is a frequent pattern
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 Construct FP-tree from a Transaction Database

TID items Items bought (ordered) frequent

100 {f, a, c, d, g, i, m, p} {f, c, a, m, p}
200 {a, b, c, f, l, m, o} {f, c, a, b, m} min_support = 3
300 {b, f, h, j, o, w} {f, b}
400 {b, c, k, s, p} {c, b, p}
500 {a, f, c, e, l, p, m, n} {f, c, a, m, p} {}
Header Table
1. Scan DB once, find
frequent 1-itemset (single Item frequency head f:4 c:1
item pattern) f 4
c 4 c:3 b:1 b:1
2. Sort frequent items in a 3
frequency descending b 3 a:3 p:1
order, f-list m 3
p 3
3. Scan DB again, construct m:2 b:1
FP-tree
F-list = f-c-a-b-m-p p:2 m:1
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 Partition Patterns and Databases

 Frequent patterns can be partitioned into subsets

according to f-list
 F-list = f-c-a-b-m-p

 Patterns containing p

 Patterns having m but no p

 …

 Patterns having c but no a nor b, m, p

 Pattern f

 Completeness and non-redundency

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 Find Patterns Having P From P-conditional Database

 Starting at the frequent item header table in the FP-tree

 Traverse the FP-tree by following the link of each frequent item p
 Accumulate all of transformed prefix paths of item p to form p’s
conditional pattern base

{}
Header Table
f:4 c:1 Conditional pattern bases
Item frequency head
f 4 item cond. pattern base
c 4 c:3 b:1 b:1
c f:3
a 3
b 3 a:3 p:1 a fc:3
m 3 b fca:1, f:1, c:1
p 3 m:2 b:1 m fca:2, fcab:1
p:2 m:1 p fcam:2, cb:1
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 From Conditional Pattern-bases to Conditional FP-trees

 For each pattern-base

 Accumulate the count for each item in the base

 Construct the FP-tree for the frequent items of the

pattern base

m-conditional pattern base:

{} fca:2, fcab:1
Header Table
Item frequency head All frequent
f:4 c:1 patterns relate to m
f 4 {}
c 4 c:3 b:1 b:1 m,

a 3 f:3  fm, cm, am,
b 3 a:3 p:1 fcm, fam, cam,
m 3 c:3 fcam
p 3 m:2 b:1
p:2 m:1 a:3
m-conditional FP-tree
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 Recursion: Mining Each Conditional FP-tree
{}

{} Cond. pattern base of “am”: (fc:3) f:3

c:3
f:3
am-conditional FP-tree
c:3 {}
Cond. pattern base of “cm”: (f:3)
a:3 f:3
m-conditional FP-tree
cm-conditional FP-tree

{}
Cond. pattern base of “cam”: (f:3) f:3
cam-conditional FP-tree

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 A Special Case: Single Prefix Path in FP-tree

 Suppose a (conditional) FP-tree T has a shared single

prefix-path P
 Mining can be decomposed into two parts
{}  Reduction of the single prefix path into one node
a1:n1  Concatenation of the mining results of the two parts
a2:n2

a3:n3
{} r1

b1:m1 C1:k1 a1:n1

 r1 =
a2:n2
+ b1:m1 C1:k1

C2:k2 C3:k3
a3:n3 C2:k2 C3:k3
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 Benefits of the FP-tree Structure

 Completeness
 Preserve complete information for frequent pattern
mining
 Never break a long pattern of any transaction
 Compactness
 Reduce irrelevant info—infrequent items are gone
 Items in frequency descending order: the more
frequently occurring, the more likely to be shared
 Never be larger than the original database (not count
node-links and the count field)

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 The Frequent Pattern Growth Mining Method
 Idea: Frequent pattern growth
 Recursively grow frequent patterns by pattern and

database partition
 Method
 For each frequent item, construct its conditional

pattern-base, and then its conditional FP-tree

 Repeat the process on each newly created conditional

FP-tree
 Until the resulting FP-tree is empty, or it contains only

one path—single path will generate all the

combinations of its sub-paths, each of which is a
frequent pattern

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 Advantages of the Pattern Growth Approach

 Divide-and-conquer:
 Decompose both the mining task and DB according to the
frequent patterns obtained so far
 Lead to focused search of smaller databases
 Other factors
 No candidate generation, no candidate test
 Compressed database: FP-tree structure
 No repeated scan of entire database
 Basic ops: counting local freq items and building sub FP-tree, no
pattern search and matching
 A good open-source implementation and refinement of FPGrowth
 FPGrowth+ (Grahne and J. Zhu, FIMI'03)
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 Further Improvements of Mining Methods

 AFOPT (Liu, et al. @ KDD’03)

 A “push-right” method for mining condensed frequent pattern
(CFP) tree
 Carpenter (Pan, et al. @ KDD’03)
 Mine data sets with small rows but numerous columns
 Construct a row-enumeration tree for efficient mining
 FPgrowth+ (Grahne and Zhu, FIMI’03)
 Efficiently Using Prefix-Trees in Mining Frequent Itemsets, Proc.
ICDM'03 Int. Workshop on Frequent Itemset Mining
Implementations (FIMI'03), Melbourne, FL, Nov. 2003
 TD-Close (Liu, et al, SDM’06)

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Extension of Pattern Growth Mining Methodology

 Mining closed frequent itemsets and max-patterns

 CLOSET (DMKD’00), FPclose, and FPMax (Grahne & Zhu, Fimi’03)

 Mining sequential patterns

 PrefixSpan (ICDE’01), CloSpan (SDM’03), BIDE (ICDE’04)

 Mining graph patterns

 gSpan (ICDM’02), CloseGraph (KDD’03)

 Constraint-based mining of frequent patterns

 Convertible constraints (ICDE’01), gPrune (PAKDD’03)

 Computing iceberg data cubes with complex measures

 H-tree, H-cubing, and Star-cubing (SIGMOD’01, VLDB’03)

 Pattern-growth-based Clustering
 MaPle (Pei, et al., ICDM’03)

 Pattern-Growth-Based Classification
 Mining frequent and discriminative patterns (Cheng, et al, ICDE’07)

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 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

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ECLAT: Mining by Exploring Vertical Data Format
 Vertical format: t(AB) = {T11, T25, …}
 tid-list: list of trans.-ids containing an itemset
 Deriving frequent patterns based on vertical intersections
 t(X) = t(Y): X and Y always happen together
 t(X)  t(Y): transaction having X always has Y
 Using diffset to accelerate mining
 Only keep track of differences of tids
 t(X) = {T1, T2, T3}, t(XY) = {T1, T3}
 Diffset (XY, X) = {T2}
 Eclat (Zaki et al. @KDD’97)
 Mining Closed patterns using vertical format: CHARM (Zaki &
Hsiao@SDM’02)
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 Summary

 Basic concepts: association rules, support-

confident framework, closed and max-patterns
 Scalable frequent pattern mining methods
 Apriori (Candidate generation & test)
 Projection-based (FPgrowth, CLOSET+, ...)
 Vertical format approach (ECLAT, CHARM, ...)
 Which patterns are interesting?
 Pattern evaluation methods

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