Mining Probabilistic Representative Frequent Patterns From Uncertain Data

Probabilistic frequent pattern mining over uncertain data has received a great deal of attention recently due to the wide applications of uncertain data. Similar to its counterpart in deterministic databases, however, probabilistic frequent pattern mining suffers from the same problem of generating an exponential number of result patterns. The large number of discovered patterns hinders further evaluation and analysis, and calls for the need to find a small number of representative patterns to approximate all other patterns. This paper formally defines the problem of probabilistic representative frequent pattern (P-RFP) mining, which aims to find the minimal set of patterns with sufficiently high probability to represent all other patterns. The problem’s bottleneck turns out to be checking whether a pattern can probabilistically represent another, which involves the computation of a joint probability of supports of two patterns. To address the problem, we propose a novel and efficient dynamic programming-based approach. Moreover, we have devised a set of effective optimization strategies to further improve the computation efficiency. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed P-RFP mining effectively reduces the size of probabilistic frequent patterns. Our proposed approach not only discovers the set of P-RFPs efficiently, but also restores the frequency probability information of patterns with an error guarantee.