Top-k high average-utility itemsets mining with effective pruning strategies

High average-utility itemset (HAUI) mining has recently received interest in the data mining field due to its balanced utility measurement, which considers not only profits and quantities of items but also the lengths of itemsets. Although several algorithms have been designed for the task of HAUI mining in recent years, it is hard for users to determine an appropriate minimum average-utility threshold for the algorithms to work efficiently and control the mining result precisely. In this paper, we address this issue by introducing a framework of top-k HAUI mining, where \(k\) is the desired number of high average-utility itemsets to be mined instead of setting a minimum average-utility threshold. An efficient list based algorithm named TKAU is proposed to mine the top-k high average-utility itemsets in a single phase. TKAU introduces two novel strategies, named EMUP and EA to avoid performing costly join operations for calculating the utilities of itemsets. Moreover, three strategies named RIU, CAD, and EPBF are also incorporated to raise its internal minimal average-utility threshold effectively, and thus reduce the search space. Extensive experiments on both real and synthetic datasets show that the proposed algorithm has excellent performance and scalability.