ExMiner: An Efficient Algorithm for Mining Top-K Frequent Patterns

Conventional frequent pattern mining algorithms require users to specify some minimum support threshold. If that specified-value is large, users may lose interesting information. In contrast, a small minimum support threshold results in a huge set of frequent patterns that users may not be able to screen for useful knowledge. To solve this problem and make algorithms more user-friendly, an idea of mining the k-most interesting frequent patterns has been proposed. This idea is based upon an algorithm for mining frequent patterns without a minimum support threshold, but with a k number of highest frequency patterns. In this paper, we propose an explorative mining algorithm, called ExMiner, to mine k-most interesting (i.e. top-k) frequent patterns from large scale datasets effectively and efficiently. The ExMiner is then combined with the idea of “build once mine anytime” to mine top-k frequent patterns sequentially. Experiments on both synthetic and real data show that our proposed methods are more efficient compared to the existing ones.