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data Mining using tRee stRuctuRe

data mining provides useful information from a large collection of data based on finding frequent patterns. as the existing apriori algorithm to do this suffers from many drawbacks, here is a tree-based approach for faster scanning and quicker analysis

Renji Reghunadh

n the last few years, data mining or knowledge discovery from data repositories has emerged as one of the most exciting fields in computer science. Data mining aims at finding useful regularities in large data sets. Interest in this field is enhanced by the growth of computerised data collections that are regularly maintained by many organisations and commercial enterprises. There is a high potential for valuable patterns to be discovered from these collections. For instance, bar code readers at supermarkets produce an extensive amount of data about purchases. When analysed, the recorded data may reveal some previously unknown but useful information about the shopping pattern or behaviour of the customers. This information could be useful in developing new marketing strategies.

There are different techniques to analyse a collection of data provided. Data mining is one such technique that digs out the different patterns and interesting pieces of information from a large pile of data. There are different algorithms designed for finding different patterns of information. The association rules is a pattern that gives such information about products as which product combinations have a greater frequency of getting purchased together. Currently, there is a large commercial interest in the area, both for offering consulting services on data mining and development of data mining software. The main objective is to create and develop an efficient algorithm for finding the association rule mining (ARM) that generates frequent patterns in large databases quicker than the already existing Apriori algorithm. This technique would have the following

advantages: 1. Minimal amount of message passing compared to traditional algorithms 2. Minimal message size compared to traditional algorithms 3. Enhanced efficiency as the number of processes increases unlike Apriori method 4. Easy implementation of the algorithm

apriori algorithm
The name of this algorithm itself indicates that the algorithm uses prior knowledge of the frequent itemset properties. A level-wise search, which is an iterative approach, is employed where k itemsets are used to explore (k+1) itemsets. Discovering association rules is usually divided into two steps. In the first step, all sets of items with support are found, and called the frew w w. e f y m ag . co m

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quent itemsets. In the second step, the frequent itemsets are used to discover the association rules. Apriori algorithm is perhaps the most well-known algorithm in the data mining field for finding frequent itemsets. A key issue in the Apriori algorithm is the performance of the subset function. A fast way of determining which candidate itemsets are involved in a transaction is needed. This can be achieved by storing the candidate itemsets in a structure called hash tree. All nodes are initially created as leaf nodes but can later be converted into internal nodes if they contain too many itemsets. Internal nodes are hash tables where each bucket points to another node. In the root node, the branch to follow is decided by applying a hashing function to the first (lowest numbered) item in the itemset. At the next level of the tree, the hashing function is applied to the second function and so on. There are many improvements made on the existing Apriori algorithm where huge databases are involved. One possible improvement is to keep track of the itemsets by bookkeeping in each transaction in the first pass itself by counting the 1-itemsets (itemsets containing one item). Using this method, the size of the structure is smaller than the actual database. Thus a hybrid plan can be used in the early pass and switched to alternative method if the bookkeeping structure becomes too huge as there is a linear relationship with the number of transactions in the Apriori method. However, there is a risk of itemsets getting left out if they dont occur frequently as the algorithm is run on randomly selected transactions. A lower threshold on the confidence and support could be used to reduce the risk. 1-itemsets, the Apriori algorithm will need to generate more than 1,000,000 candidate 2-itemsets and accumulate and test the occurrence frequencies. Moreover, to discover a frequency pattern of size 100, such as a1, a2, a3,, a100, it must generate more than 1030 candidates in total. 2. It may need to repeatedly scan the database and check the last set of candidates by pattern matching. This is especially the case for mining long patterns. cess. Using its allocated itemset, each process proceeds as follows: 1. Remove all records in the input dataset that do not have common interest with the allocation itemset. 2. From the remaining records, remove those attributes whose column number is greater than the end column number. We cannot remove those attributes whose identifiers are less than the start column number because they may represent the sub-string of a large itemset to be included in the subtree counted by the process. The process begins with a top-level tree comprising only those 1-itemsets included in its allocation itemset. The process then generates the candidate 2-itemsets that belong to its sub T-tree. These will comprise all the possible pairings between each element in the allocation itemset of those elements. The support values for the candidate 2-itemsets are then determined and the sets then pruned to leave only large 2-itemsets. Thus in this way, third-level candidate sets can be generated. No attributes from succeeding partitions need be considered. However, the subsets involved in preceding an allocation of itemset will be present in the possible candidate itemsets, which would be counted by some other process.

solution: the tree approach

I have adopted a tree-based approach over the Apriori algorithm. This treebased structure enables faster scanning and quicker analysis. The T-tree differs from more standard set enumeration trees in that the nodes at the same level in any subbranch are organised into 1-D arrays so that array indices represent column numbers. For this purpose, we make a reverse tree. This permits direct indexing with the attribute/column numbers. The T-tree offers two initial advantages over standard set enumeration trees: 1. Since indexing mechanism is used, there is fast traversal of the tree. 2. The requirement of pointers is avoided as explicit storage of the reduced itemset labels is not desired.

Result: Faster execution

In terms of the execution time, the vertical partitioning algorithm performs much better than the task distribution algorithms because of the messaging overhead. Also, for distributed algorithm, as processes are added, the increasing overhead of messaging more than outweighs any gain from using additional processes, so distribution/ parallelisation becomes counterproductive. The partitioning shows some gain from the addition of further processes. Hence vertical partitioning gives the best results and best scaling.
The author is an assistant professor in MCA department of SCMS School of Technology & Management (SSTM), Cochin, Kerala
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strategy: Vertical partitioning

The partitioning algorithm commences by distributing the input dataset over the available number of processes using a vertical partitioning strategy. Initially, the set of single attributes (columns) is split equally between the available processes so that an allocation itemset is defined for each process in terms of a start column number and end column number. Each process will have its own allocation itemset, which is then used to determine the subset of the input dataset to be considered by the pro-

its drawback
The Apriori algorithm, however, suffers from some drawbacks: 1. It may need to generate a huge number of candidate sets, for example. If there are 100,000 frequent

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