TreeITL-mine: Mining frequent itemsets using pattern growth, tid intersection, and prefix tree

An important problem in data mining is the discovery of association rules that identify relationships among sets of items. Finding frequent itemsets is computationally the most expensive step in association rules mining, and so most of the research attention has been focused on it. In this paper, we present a more efficient algorithm for mining frequent itemsets. In designing our algorithm, we have combined the ideas of pattern-growth, tid-intersection and prefix trees, with significant modifications. We present performance comparisons of our algorithm against the fastest Apriori algorithm, and the recently developed H-Mine algorithm. We have tested all the algorithms using several widely used test datasets. The performance results indicate that our algorithm significantly reduces the processing time for mining frequent itemsets in dense data sets that contain relatively long patterns.