Fast Algorithms for Mining Generalized Frequent Patterns of Generalized Association Rules

SUMMARY Mining generalized frequent patterns of generalized association rules is an important process in knowledge discovery system. In this paper, we propose a new approach for efficiently mining all frequent patterns using a novel set enumeration algorithm with two types of constraints on two generalized itemset relationships, called subset-superset and ancestor-descendant constraints. We also show a method to mine a smaller set of generalized closed frequent itemsets instead of mining a large set of conventional generalized frequent itemsets. To this end, we develop two algorithms called SET and cSET for mining generalized frequent itemsets and generalized closed frequent itemsets, respectively. By a number of experiments, the proposed algorithms outperform the previous well-known algorithms in both computational time and memory utilization. Furthermore, the experiments with real datasets indicate that mining generalized closed frequent itemsets gains more merit on computational costs since the number of generalized closed frequent itemsets is much more smaller than the number of generalized frequent itemsets.