1. What Is Association Mining?
Association rule mining:
Finding frequent patterns, associations, correlations, or causal structures among sets of items or objects in transaction databases, relational databases, and other information repositories.
Frequent pattern: pattern (set of items, sequence, etc.) that occurs frequently in a database [AIS93]
Motivation: finding 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?

2. Why Is Frequent Pattern or Association Mining Important?
Foundation for many essential data mining tasks
Association, correlation, causality
Sequential patterns, temporal or cyclic association, partial periodicity, spatial and multimedia association
Associative classification, cluster analysis, iceberg cube, fascicles (semantic data compression)
Broad applications
Basket data analysis, cross-marketing, catalog design, sale campaign analysis
Web log (click stream) analysis, DNA sequence analysis, etc.

3. Association Rule Mining
Given a set of transactions, find rules that will predict the occurrence of an item based on the occurrences of other items in the transaction
Market-Basket transactions
Example of Association Rules
{Diaper}  {Beer}, {Milk, Bread}  {Eggs,Coke}, {Beer, Bread}  {Milk},
Implication means co-occurrence, not causality!

4. Definition: Frequent Itemset
A collection of one or more items
Example: {Milk, Bread, Diaper}
k-itemset
An itemset that contains k items
Support count ()
Frequency of occurrence of an itemset
E.g. ({Milk, Bread,Diaper}) = 2
Support
Fraction of transactions that contain an itemset
E.g. s({Milk, Bread, Diaper}) = 2/5
Frequent Itemset
An itemset whose support is greater than or equal to a minsup threshold

5. Definition: Association Rule
An implication expression of the form X  Y, where X and Y are itemsets
Example: {Milk, Diaper}  {Beer}
Rule Evaluation Metrics
Support (s)
Fraction of transactions that contain both X and Y
Confidence (c)
Measures how often items in Y appear in transactions that contain X
Example:

6. Basic Concepts: Frequent Patterns and Association Rules
Transaction-id
Items bought 10
A, B, C 20
A, C 30
A, D 40
B, E, F
Itemset X={x1, …, xk}
Find all the rules XY with min confidence and support
support, s, probability that a transaction contains XY
confidence, c, conditional probability that a transaction having X also contains Y.
Customer
buys diaper
buys both
buys beer
Let min_support = 50%, min_conf = 50%:
A  C (50%, 66.7%)
C  A (50%, 100%)

7. Association Rule Mining Task
Given a set of transactions T, the goal of association rule mining is to find all rules having
support ≥ minsup threshold
confidence ≥ minconf threshold
Brute-force approach:
List all possible association rules
Compute the support and confidence for each rule
Prune rules that fail the minsup and minconf thresholds
 Computationally prohibitive!

8. Frequent Itemset Generation
Given d items, there are 2d possible candidate itemsets

9. 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 כ X, with the same support as X (proposed by Pasquier, et ICDT’99)
An itemset X is a max-pattern if X is frequent and there exists no frequent super-pattern Y כ X (proposed by SIGMOD’98)
Closed pattern is a lossless compression of freq. patterns
Reducing the # of patterns and rules

10. 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?
What is the set of all patterns? !!

11. Mining Association Rules
Example of Rules:
{Milk,Diaper}  {Beer} (s=0.4, c=0.67) {Milk,Beer}  {Diaper} (s=0.4, c=1.0)
{Diaper,Beer}  {Milk} (s=0.4, c=0.67)
{Beer}  {Milk,Diaper} (s=0.4, c=0.67) {Diaper}  {Milk,Beer} (s=0.4, c=0.5)
{Milk}  {Diaper,Beer} (s=0.4, c=0.5)
Observations:
All the above rules are binary partitions of the same itemset: {Milk, Diaper, Beer}
Rules originating from the same itemset have identical support but can have different confidence
Thus, we may decouple the support and confidence requirements

12. Mining Association Rules: What We Need to Know
Goal: Rules with high support/confidence
How to compute?
Support: Find sets of items that occur frequently
Confidence: Find frequency of subsets of supported itemsets
If we have all frequently occurring sets of items (frequent itemsets), we can compute support and confidence!

13. Mining Association Rules
Two-step approach:
Frequent Itemset Generation
Generate all itemsets whose support  minsup
Rule Generation
Generate high confidence rules from each frequent itemset, where each rule is a binary partitioning of a frequent itemset
Frequent itemset generation is still computationally expensive

14. Frequent Itemset Generation
Given d items, there are 2d possible candidate itemsets

15. Frequent Itemset Generation
Brute-force approach:
Each itemset in the lattice is a candidate frequent itemset
Count the support of each candidate by scanning the database
Match each transaction against every candidate
Complexity ~ O(NMw) => Expensive since M = 2d !!!

16. Computational Complexity
Given d unique items:
Total number of itemsets = 2d
Total number of possible association rules:
If d=6, R = 602 rules

17. Frequent Itemset Generation Strategies
Reduce the number of candidates (M)
Complete search: M=2d
Use pruning techniques to reduce M
Reduce the number of transactions (N)
Reduce size of N as the size of itemset increases
Used by DHP and vertical-based mining algorithms
Reduce the number of comparisons (NM)
Use efficient data structures to store the candidates or transactions
No need to match every candidate against every transaction

18. Reducing Number of Candidates
Apriori principle:
If an itemset is frequent, then all of its subsets must also be frequent
If {beer, diaper, nuts} is frequent, so is {beer, diaper}
i.e., every transaction having {beer, diaper, nuts} also contains {beer, diaper}
Apriori principle holds due to the following property of the support measure:
Support of an itemset never exceeds the support of its subsets
This is known as the anti-monotone property of support

19. Illustrating Apriori Principle
Found to be Infrequent
Pruned supersets

20. Illustrating Apriori Principle
Items (1-itemsets)
Pairs (2-itemsets)
(No need to generate candidates involving Coke or Eggs)
Minimum Support = 3
Triplets (3-itemsets)
If every subset is considered,
6C1 + 6C2 + 6C3 = 41
With support-based pruning,
= 13

21. Apriori Algorithm Method: Let k=1
Generate frequent itemsets of length 1
Repeat until no new frequent itemsets are identified
Generate length (k+1) candidate itemsets from length k frequent itemsets
Prune candidate itemsets containing subsets of length k that are infrequent
Count the support of each candidate by scanning the DB
Eliminate candidates that are infrequent, leaving only those that are frequent

22. The Apriori Algorithm—An Example
Supmin = 2
Itemset
sup
{A} 2
{B} 3
{C}
{D} 1
{E}
Database TDB
Itemset
sup
{A} 2
{B} 3
{C}
{E} L1 C1
Tid
Items 10
A, C, D 20
B, C, E 30
A, B, C, E 40
B, E
1st scan C2
Itemset
sup
{A, B} 1
{A, C} 2
{A, E}
{B, C}
{B, E} 3
{C, E} C2
Itemset
{A, B}
{A, C}
{A, E}
{B, C}
{B, E}
{C, E} L2
2nd scan
Itemset
sup
{A, C} 2
{B, C}
{B, E} 3
{C, E} C3 L3
Itemset
{B, C, E}
3rd scan
Itemset
sup
{B, C, E} 2

23. increment the count of all candidates in Ck+1 that are contained in t
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 that are contained in t
Lk+1 = candidates in Ck+1 with min_support
end
return k Lk;

24. Important Details of Apriori
How to generate candidates?
Step 1: self-joining Lk
Step 2: pruning
How to count supports of candidates?
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}

25. How to Generate Candidates?
Suppose the items in Lk-1 are listed in an order
Step 1: self-joining Lk-1
insert into Ck
select p.item1, p.item2, …, p.itemk-1, q.itemk-1
from Lk-1 p, Lk-1 q
where p.item1=q.item1, …, p.itemk-2=q.itemk-2, p.itemk-1 < q.itemk-1
Step 2: pruning
forall itemsets c in Ck do
forall (k-1)-subsets s of c do
if (s is not in Lk-1) then delete c from Ck

26. Reducing Number of Comparisons
Candidate counting:
Scan the database of transactions to determine the support of each candidate itemset
To reduce the number of comparisons, store the candidates in a hash structure
Instead of matching each transaction against every candidate, match it against candidates contained in the hashed buckets

27. 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

28. Generate Hash Tree
Suppose you have 15 candidate itemsets of length 3:
{1 4 5}, {1 2 4}, {4 5 7}, {1 2 5}, {4 5 8}, {1 5 9}, {1 3 6}, {2 3 4}, {5 6 7}, {3 4 5}, {3 5 6}, {3 5 7}, {6 8 9}, {3 6 7}, {3 6 8}
You need:
Hash function
Max leaf size: max number of itemsets stored in a leaf node (if number of candidate itemsets exceeds max leaf size, split the node)
2 3 4
5 6 7
1 4 5
1 3 6
1 2 4
4 5 7
1 2 5
4 5 8
1 5 9
3 4 5
3 5 6
3 5 7
6 8 9
3 6 7
3 6 8
1,4,7
2,5,8
3,6,9
Hash function

29. Association Rule Discovery: Hash tree
Hash Function
Candidate Hash Tree
1 5 9
1 4 5
1 3 6
3 4 5
3 6 7
3 6 8
3 5 6
3 5 7
6 8 9
2 3 4
5 6 7
1 2 4
4 5 7
1 2 5
4 5 8
1,4,7
3,6,9
2,5,8
Hash on 1, 4 or 7

30. Association Rule Discovery: Hash tree
Hash Function
Candidate Hash Tree
1 5 9
1 4 5
1 3 6
3 4 5
3 6 7
3 6 8
3 5 6
3 5 7
6 8 9
2 3 4
5 6 7
1 2 4
4 5 7
1 2 5
4 5 8
1,4,7
3,6,9
2,5,8
Hash on 2, 5 or 8

31. Association Rule Discovery: Hash tree
Hash Function
Candidate Hash Tree
1 5 9
1 4 5
1 3 6
3 4 5
3 6 7
3 6 8
3 5 6
3 5 7
6 8 9
2 3 4
5 6 7
1 2 4
4 5 7
1 2 5
4 5 8
1,4,7
3,6,9
2,5,8
Hash on 3, 6 or 9

32. Subset Operation
Given a transaction t, what are the possible subsets of size 3?

33. Subset Operation Using Hash Tree
1,4,7
2,5,8
3,6,9
Hash Function
transaction
1 +
3 5 6
2 +
1 5 9
1 4 5
1 3 6
3 4 5
3 6 7
3 6 8
3 5 6
3 5 7
6 8 9
2 3 4
5 6 7
1 2 4
4 5 7
1 2 5
4 5 8
5 6
3 +

34. Subset Operation Using Hash Tree
1,4,7
2,5,8
3,6,9
Hash Function
transaction
1 +
3 5 6
2 +
3 5 6
1 2 +
5 6
3 +
5 6
1 3 +
2 3 4 6
1 5 +
5 6 7
1 4 5
1 3 6
3 4 5
3 5 6
3 5 7
3 6 7
3 6 8
6 8 9
1 2 4
1 2 5
1 5 9
4 5 7
4 5 8

35. Subset Operation Using Hash Tree
1,4,7
2,5,8
3,6,9
Hash Function
transaction
1 +
3 5 6
2 +
3 5 6
1 2 +
5 6
3 +
5 6
1 3 +
2 3 4 6
1 5 +
5 6 7
1 4 5
1 3 6
3 4 5
3 5 6
3 5 7
3 6 7
3 6 8
6 8 9
1 2 4
1 2 5
1 5 9
4 5 7
4 5 8
Match transaction against 11 out of 15 candidates

36. Factors Affecting Complexity
Choice of minimum support threshold
lowering support threshold results in more frequent itemsets
this may increase number of candidates and max length of frequent itemsets
Dimensionality (number of items) of the data set
more space is needed to store support count of each item
if number of frequent items also increases, both computation and I/O costs may also increase
Size of database
since Apriori makes multiple passes, run time of algorithm may increase with number of transactions
Average transaction width
transaction width increases with denser data sets
This may increase max length of frequent itemsets and traversals of hash tree (number of subsets in a transaction increases with its width)

37. Compact Representation of Frequent Itemsets
Some itemsets are redundant because they have identical support as their supersets
Number of frequent itemsets
Need a compact representation

38. Maximal Frequent Itemset
An itemset is maximal frequent if none of its immediate supersets is frequent
Maximal Itemsets
Infrequent Itemsets
Border

39. Closed Itemset
An itemset is closed if none of its immediate supersets has the same support as the itemset

40. Maximal vs Closed Itemsets
Transaction Ids
Not supported by any transactions

41. Maximal vs Closed Frequent Itemsets
Closed but not maximal
Minimum support = 2
Closed and maximal
# Closed = 9
# Maximal = 4

42. Maximal vs Closed Itemsets

43. Alternative Methods for Frequent Itemset Generation
Traversal of Itemset Lattice
General-to-specific vs Specific-to-general

44. Alternative Methods for Frequent Itemset Generation
Traversal of Itemset Lattice
Equivalent Classes

45. Alternative Methods for Frequent Itemset Generation
Traversal of Itemset Lattice
Breadth-first vs Depth-first

46. Alternative Methods for Frequent Itemset Generation
Representation of Database
horizontal vs vertical data layout

47. Efficient Implementation of Apriori in SQL
Hard to get good performance out of pure SQL (SQL- 92) based approaches alone
Make use of object-relational extensions like UDFs, BLOBs, Table functions etc.
Get orders of magnitude improvement
S. Sarawagi, S. Thomas, and R. Agrawal. Integrating association rule mining with relational database systems: Alternatives and implications. In SIGMOD’98

48. Challenges of Frequent Pattern Mining
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

49. 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. An efficient algorithm for mining association in large databases. In VLDB’95

50. DHP: Reduce the Number of Candidates
A k-itemset whose corresponding hashing bucket count is below the threshold cannot be frequent
Candidates: a, b, c, d, e
Hash entries: {ab, ad, ae} {bd, be, de} …
Frequent 1-itemset: a, b, d, e
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. In SIGMOD’95

51. Sampling for Frequent Patterns
Select a sample of original database, mine frequent patterns within sample using Apriori
Scan database once to verify frequent itemsets found in sample, only borders of closure of frequent patterns are checked
Example: check abcd instead of ab, ac, …, etc.
Scan database again to find missed frequent patterns
H. Toivonen. Sampling large databases for association rules. In VLDB’96

52. Bottleneck of Frequent-pattern Mining
Multiple database scans are costly
Mining long patterns needs many passes of scanning and generates lots of candidates
To find frequent itemset i1i2…i100
# of scans: 100
# of Candidates: (1001) + (1002) + … + (110000) = = 1.27*1030 !
Bottleneck: candidate-generation-and-test
Can we avoid candidate generation?

53. Mining Frequent Patterns Without Candidate Generation
Grow long patterns from short ones using local frequent items
“abc” is a frequent pattern
Get all transactions having “abc”: DB|abc
“d” is a local frequent item in DB|abc  abcd is a frequent pattern

54. FP-growth Algorithm
Use a compressed representation of the database using an FP-tree
Once an FP-tree has been constructed, it uses a recursive divide-and-conquer approach to mine the frequent itemsets

55. FP-tree construction null After reading TID=1: A:1 B:1

56. FP-Tree Construction null B:3 A:7 B:5 C:3 C:1 D:1 D:1 C:3 E:1 D:1 E:1
Transaction Database
null
B:3
A:7
B:5
C:3
C:1
D:1
Header table
D:1
C:3
E:1
D:1
E:1
D:1
E:1
D:1
Pointers are used to assist frequent itemset generation

57. FP-growth
Conditional Pattern base for D: P = {(A:1,B:1,C:1), (A:1,B:1), (A:1,C:1), (A:1), (B:1,C:1)}
Recursively apply FP-growth on P
Frequent Itemsets found (with sup > 1): AD, BD, CD, ACD, BCD
null
A:7
B:1
B:5
C:1
C:1
D:1
D:1
C:3
D:1
D:1
D:1

58. Tree Projection Set enumeration tree:
Possible Extension: E(A) = {B,C,D,E}
Possible Extension: E(ABC) = {D,E}

59. Tree Projection Items are listed in lexicographic order
Each node P stores the following information:
Itemset for node P
List of possible lexicographic extensions of P: E(P)
Pointer to projected database of its ancestor node
Bitvector containing information about which transactions in the projected database contain the itemset

60. Projected Database Projected Database for node A: Original Database:
For each transaction T, projected transaction at node A is T  E(A)

61. ECLAT
For each item, store a list of transaction ids (tids)
TID-list

62. ECLAT
Determine support of any k-itemset by intersecting tid-lists of two of its (k-1) subsets.
3 traversal approaches:
top-down, bottom-up and hybrid
Advantage: very fast support counting
Disadvantage: intermediate tid-lists may become too large for memory  

63. Rule Generation
Given a frequent itemset L, find all non-empty subsets f  L such that f  L – f satisfies the minimum confidence requirement
If {A,B,C,D} is a frequent itemset, candidate rules:
ABC D, ABD C, ACD B, BCD A, A BCD, B ACD, C ABD, D ABC AB CD, AC  BD, AD  BC, BC AD, BD AC, CD AB,
If |L| = k, then there are 2k – 2 candidate association rules (ignoring L   and   L)

64. Rule Generation
How to efficiently generate rules from frequent itemsets?
In general, confidence does not have an anti- monotone property
c(ABC D) can be larger or smaller than c(AB D)
But confidence of rules generated from the same itemset has an anti-monotone property
e.g., L = {A,B,C,D}: c(ABC  D)  c(AB  CD)  c(A  BCD)
Confidence is anti-monotone w.r.t. number of items on the RHS of the rule

65. Rule Generation for Apriori Algorithm
Lattice of rules
Pruned Rules
Low Confidence Rule

66. Rule Generation for Apriori Algorithm
Candidate rule is generated by merging two rules that share the same prefix in the rule consequent
join(CD=>AB,BD=>AC) would produce the candidate rule D => ABC
Prune rule D=>ABC if its subset AD=>BC does not have high confidence

67. Effect of Support Distribution
Many real data sets have skewed support distribution
Support distribution of a retail data set