Mining high utility itemsets by dynamically pruning the tree structure

Mining high utility itemsets is one of the most important research issues in data mining owing to its ability to consider nonbinary frequency values of items in transactions and different profit values for each item. Mining such itemsets from a transaction database involves finding those itemsets with utility above a user-specified threshold. In this paper, we propose an efficient concurrent algorithm, called CHUI-Mine (Concurrent High Utility Itemsets Mine), for mining high utility itemsets by dynamically pruning the tree structure. A tree structure, called the CHUI-Tree, is introduced to capture the important utility information of the candidate itemsets. By recording changes in support counts of candidate high utility items during the tree construction process, we implement dynamic CHUI-Tree pruning, and discuss the rationality thereof. The CHUI-Mine algorithm makes use of a concurrent strategy, enabling the simultaneous construction of a CHUI-Tree and the discovery of high utility itemsets. Our algorithm reduces the problem of huge memory usage for tree construction and traversal in tree-based algorithms for mining high utility itemsets. Extensive experimental results show that the CHUI-Mine algorithm is both efficient and scalable.