What Is Frequent Pattern Analysis?

 Frequent pattern: a pattern (a set of items, subsequences, substructures,

etc.) that occurs frequently in a data set
 First proposed by Agrawal, Imielinski, and Swami [AIS93] in the context
of frequent itemsets and association rule mining
 Motivation: Finding inherent regularities in data
 What products were often purchased together?— Beer and diapers?!
 What are the subsequent purchases after buying a PC?
 What kinds of DNA are sensitive to this new drug?
 Can we automatically classify web documents?
 Applications
 Basket data analysis, cross-marketing, catalog design, sale campaign
analysis, Web log (click stream) analysis, and DNA sequence analysis.
 Why Is Freq. Pattern Mining Important?

 Discloses an intrinsic and important property of data sets

 Forms the foundation for many essential data mining tasks
 Association, correlation, and causality analysis
 Sequential, structural (e.g., sub-graph) patterns
 Pattern analysis in spatiotemporal, multimedia, time-
series, and stream data
 Classification: associative classification
 Cluster analysis: frequent pattern-based clustering
 Data warehousing: iceberg cube and cube-gradient
 Semantic data compression: fascicles
 Broad applications
 Basic Concepts: Frequent Patterns and
Association Rules
Transaction-id Items bought  Itemset X = {x1, …, xk}
10 A, B, D
 Find all the rules X  Y with minimum
20 A, C, D support and confidence
30 A, D, E
 support, s, probability that a
40 B, E, F
transaction contains X  Y
50 B, C, D, E, F
 confidence, c, conditional
Customer Customer probability that a transaction
buys both buys diaper
having X also contains Y
Let supmin = 50%, confmin = 50%
Freq. Pat.: {A:3, B:3, D:4, E:3, AD:3}
Association rules:
Customer A  D (60%, 100%)
buys beer
D  A (60%, 75%)
 Closed Patterns and Max-Patterns
 A long pattern contains a combinatorial number of sub-
patterns, e.g., {a1, …, a100} contains (1001) + (1002) + … +
(110000) = 2100 – 1 = 1.27*1030 sub-patterns!
 Solution: Mine closed patterns and max-patterns instead
 An itemset X is closed if X is frequent and there exists no
super-pattern Y ‫ כ‬X, with the same support as X
 An itemset X is a max-pattern if X is frequent and there
exists no frequent super-pattern Y ‫ כ‬X
 Closed pattern is a lossless compression of freq. patterns
 Reducing the # of patterns and rules
 Closed Patterns and Max-Patterns
 Exercise. DB = {<a1, …, a100>, < a1, …, a50>}
 Min_sup = 1.
 What is the set of closed itemset?
 <a1, …, a100>: 1
 < a1, …, a50>: 2
 What is the set of max-pattern?
 <a1, …, a100>: 1
 What is the set of all patterns?
 !!
Scalable Methods for Mining Frequent Patterns

 The downward closure property of frequent patterns

 Any subset of a frequent itemset must be frequent

 If {beer, diaper, nuts} is frequent, so is {beer,

diaper}
 i.e., every transaction having {beer, diaper, nuts} also

contains {beer, diaper}

 Scalable mining methods: Three major approaches
 Apriori (Agrawal & Srikant@VLDB’94)

 Freq. pattern growth (FPgrowth—Han, Pei & Yin

@SIGMOD’00)
 Vertical data format approach (Charm—Zaki & Hsiao

@SDM’02)
Apriori: A Candidate Generation-and-Test Approach

 Apriori pruning principle: If there is any itemset which is

infrequent, its superset should not be generated/tested!
 Method:
 Initially, scan DB once to get frequent 1-itemset
 Generate length (k+1) candidate itemsets from length k
frequent itemsets
 Test the candidates against DB
 Terminate when no frequent or candidate set can be
generated
 The Apriori Algorithm—An Example
Supmin = 2 Itemset sup
Itemset sup
Database TDB {A} 2
Tid Items
L1 {A} 2
C1 {B} 3
{B} 3
10 A, C, D {C} 3
1st scan {C} 3
20 B, C, E {D} 1
{E} 3
30 A, B, C, E {E} 3
40 B, E
C2 Itemset sup C2 Itemset
{A, B} 1
L2 Itemset sup 2nd scan {A, B}
{A, C} 2
{A, C} 2 {A, C}
{A, E} 1
{B, C} 2
{B, C} 2 {A, E}
{B, E} 3
{B, E} 3 {B, C}
{C, E} 2
{C, E} 2 {B, E}
{C, E}

C3 Itemset L3 Itemset sup

3rd scan
{B, C, E} {B, C, E} 2
 The Apriori Algorithm
 Pseudo-code:
Ck: Candidate itemset of size k
Lk : frequent itemset of size k
L1 = {frequent items};
for (k = 1; Lk !=; k++) do begin
Ck+1 = candidates generated from Lk;
for each transaction t in database do
increment the count of all candidates in Ck+1
that are contained in t
Lk+1 = candidates in Ck+1 with min_support
end
return k Lk;
 Important Details of Apriori
 How to generate candidates?
 Step 1: self-joining Lk
 Step 2: pruning
 How to count supports of candidates?
 Example of Candidate-generation
 L3={abc, abd, acd, ace, bcd}
 Self-joining: L3*L3
 abcd from abc and abd
 acde from acd and ace
 Pruning:
 acde is removed because ade is not in L3
 C4={abcd}
 How to Generate Candidates?

 Suppose the items in Lk-1 are listed in an order

 Step 1: self-joining Lk-1
insert into Ck
select p.item1, p.item2, …, p.itemk-1, q.itemk-1
from Lk-1 p, Lk-1 q
where p.item1=q.item1, …, p.itemk-2=q.itemk-2, p.itemk-1 <
q.itemk-1
 Step 2: pruning
forall itemsets c in Ck do
forall (k-1)-subsets s of c do
if (s is not in Lk-1) then delete c from Ck
 Challenges of Frequent Pattern Mining

 Challenges
 Multiple scans of transaction database
 Huge number of candidates
 Tedious workload of support counting for candidates
 Improving Apriori: general ideas
 Reduce passes of transaction database scans
 Shrink number of candidates
 Facilitate support counting of candidates
 Bottleneck of Frequent-pattern Mining

 Multiple database scans are costly

 Mining long patterns needs many passes of
scanning and generates lots of candidates
 To find frequent itemset i1i2…i100
 # of scans: 100
 # of Candidates: (1001) + (1002) + … + (110000) = 2100-
1 = 1.27*1030 !
 Bottleneck: candidate-generation-and-test
 Can we avoid candidate generation?
 Mining Frequent Patterns Without
Candidate Generation

 Grow long patterns from short ones using local

frequent items

 “abc” is a frequent pattern

 Get all transactions having “abc”: DB|abc

 “d” is a local frequent item in DB|abc  abcd is

a frequent pattern
Construct FP-tree from a Transaction Database

TID Items bought (ordered) frequent items

100 {f, a, c, d, g, i, m, p} {f, c, a, m, p}
200 {a, b, c, f, l, m, o} {f, c, a, b, m}
300 {b, f, h, j, o, w} {f, b} min_support = 3
400 {b, c, k, s, p} {c, b, p}
500 {a, f, c, e, l, p, m, n} {f, c, a, m, p} {}
Header Table
1. Scan DB once, find
frequent 1-itemset Item frequency head f:4 c:1
(single item pattern) f 4
c 4 c:3 b:1 b:1
2. Sort frequent items in a 3
frequency descending b 3
order, f-list m 3
a:3 p:1
p 3
3. Scan DB again, m:2 b:1
construct FP-tree
F-list=f-c-a-b-m-p p:2 m:1
 Benefits of the FP-tree Structure

 Completeness
 Preserve complete information for frequent pattern

mining
 Never break a long pattern of any transaction

 Compactness
 Reduce irrelevant info—infrequent items are gone

 Items in frequency descending order: the more

frequently occurring, the more likely to be shared

 Never be larger than the original database (not count

node-links and the count field)

 For Connect-4 DB, compression ratio could be over 100
 Partition Patterns and Databases

 Frequent patterns can be partitioned into subsets

according to f-list
 F-list=f-c-a-b-m-p

 Patterns containing p

 Patterns having m but no p

 …

 Patterns having c but no a nor b, m, p

 Pattern f

 Completeness and non-redundency

Find Patterns Having P From P-conditional Database

 Starting at the frequent item header table in the FP-tree

 Traverse the FP-tree by following the link of each frequent item p
 Accumulate all of transformed prefix paths of item p to form p’s
conditional pattern base

{}
Header Table
f:4 c:1 Conditional pattern bases
Item frequency head
f 4 item cond. pattern base
c 4 c:3 b:1 b:1 c f:3
a 3
b 3 a:3 p:1 a fc:3
m 3 b fca:1, f:1, c:1
p 3 m:2 b:1 m fca:2, fcab:1

p:2 m:1 p fcam:2, cb:1

From Conditional Pattern-bases to Conditional FP-trees

 For each pattern-base

 Accumulate the count for each item in the base

 Construct the FP-tree for the frequent items of the

pattern base

m-conditional pattern base:

{} fca:2, fcab:1
Header Table
Item frequency head All frequent
f:4 c:1 patterns relate to m
f 4 {}
c 4 c:3 b:1 b:1 m,

a 3 f:3  fm, cm, am,
b 3 a:3 p:1 fcm, fam, cam,
m 3 c:3 fcam
p 3 m:2 b:1
p:2 m:1 a:3
m-conditional FP-tree
 A Special Case: Single Prefix Path in FP-tree

 Suppose a (conditional) FP-tree T has a shared

single prefix-path P
 Mining can be decomposed into two parts
{}
 Reduction of the single prefix path into one node
a1:n1  Concatenation of the mining results of the two
a2:n2 parts
a3:n3
{} r1

b1:m1 C1:k1 a1:n1

 r1 = + b1:m1 C1:k1
a2:n2
C2:k2 C3:k3
a3:n3 C2:k2 C3:k3
 Mining Frequent Patterns With FP-trees

 Idea: Frequent pattern growth

 Recursively grow frequent patterns by pattern and

database partition
 Method
 For each frequent item, construct its conditional

pattern-base, and then its conditional FP-tree

 Repeat the process on each newly created conditional

FP-tree
 Until the resulting FP-tree is empty, or it contains only

one path—single path will generate all the

combinations of its sub-paths, each of which is a
frequent pattern
FP-Growth vs. Apriori: Scalability With the Support
Threshold

100 Data set T25I20D10K

90 D1 FP-grow th runtime
D1 Apriori runtime
80

70
Run time(sec.)

60
50

40

30

20

10
0
0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3
Support threshold(%)
 Why Is FP-Growth the Winner?

 Divide-and-conquer:
 decompose both the mining task and DB according to
the frequent patterns obtained so far
 leads to focused search of smaller databases
 Other factors
 no candidate generation, no candidate test
 compressed database: FP-tree structure
 no repeated scan of entire database
 basic ops—counting local freq items and building sub
FP-tree, no pattern search and matching
 Mining Various Kinds of Association Rules

 Mining multilevel association

 Miming multidimensional association

 Mining quantitative association

 Mining interesting correlation patterns

 Mining Multiple-Level Association Rules

 Items often form hierarchies

 Flexible support settings
 Items at the lower level are expected to have lower
support
 Exploration of shared multi-level mining (Agrawal &
Srikant@VLB’95, Han & Fu@VLDB’95)

uniform support reduced support

Level 1
Milk Level 1
min_sup = 5%
[support = 10%] min_sup = 5%

Level 2 2% Milk Skim Milk Level 2

min_sup = 5% [support = 6%] [support = 4%] min_sup = 3%
Multi-level Association: Redundancy Filtering

 Some rules may be redundant due to “ancestor”

relationships between items.
 Example
 milk  wheat bread [support = 8%, confidence = 70%]

 2% milk  wheat bread [support = 2%, confidence = 72%]

 We say the first rule is an ancestor of the second rule.
 A rule is redundant if its support is close to the “expected”
value, based on the rule’s ancestor.
 Mining Multi-Dimensional Association
 Single-dimensional rules:
buys(X, “milk”)  buys(X, “bread”)
 Multi-dimensional rules:  2 dimensions or predicates
 Inter-dimension assoc. rules (no repeated predicates)
age(X,”19-25”)  occupation(X,“student”)  buys(X, “coke”)
 hybrid-dimension assoc. rules (repeated predicates)
age(X,”19-25”)  buys(X, “popcorn”)  buys(X, “coke”)
 Categorical Attributes: finite number of possible values, no
ordering among values—data cube approach
 Quantitative Attributes: numeric, implicit ordering among
values—discretization, clustering, and gradient approaches
 Mining Quantitative Associations

 Techniques can be categorized by how numerical

attributes, such as age or salary are treated
1. Static discretization based on predefined concept
hierarchies (data cube methods)
2. Dynamic discretization based on data distribution
(quantitative rules, e.g., Agrawal & Srikant@SIGMOD96)
3. Clustering: Distance-based association (e.g., Yang &
Miller@SIGMOD97)
 one dimensional clustering then association
4. Deviation: (such as Aumann and Lindell@KDD99)
Sex = female => Wage: mean=$7/hr (overall mean = $9)
Static Discretization of Quantitative Attributes

 Discretized prior to mining using concept hierarchy.

 Numeric values are replaced by ranges.
 In relational database, finding all frequent k-predicate sets
will require k or k+1 table scans.
 Data cube is well suited for mining. ()

 The cells of an n-dimensional

(age) (income) (buys)
cuboid correspond to the
predicate sets.
(age, income) (age,buys) (income,buys)
 Mining from data cubes
can be much faster.
(age,income,buys)
 Quantitative Association Rules
 Proposed by Lent, Swami and Widom ICDE’97
 Numeric attributes are dynamically discretized
 Such that the confidence or compactness of the rules
mined is maximized
 2-D quantitative association rules: Aquan1  Aquan2  Acat
 Cluster adjacent
association rules
to form general
rules using a 2-D grid
 Example
age(X,”34-35”)  income(X,”30-50K”)
 buys(X,”high resolution TV”)
 The Apriori Algorithm — Example
Database D itemset sup.
L1 itemset sup.
TID Items C1 {1} 2 {1} 2
100 134 {2} 3 {2} 3
200 235 Scan D {3} 3 {3} 3
300 1235 {4} 1 {5} 3
400 25 {5} 3
C2 itemset sup C2 itemset
L2 itemset sup {1 2} 1 Scan D {1 2}
{1 3} 2 {1 3} 2 {1 3}
{2 3} 2 {1 5} 1 {1 5}
{2 3} 2 {2 3}
{2 5} 3
{2 5} 3 {2 5}
{3 5} 2
{3 5} 2 {3 5}
C3 itemset Scan D L3 itemset sup
{2 3 5} {2 3 5} 2
 Naïve Algorithm: Apriori + Constraint
Database D itemset sup.
L1 itemset sup.
TID Items C1 {1} 2 {1} 2
100 134 {2} 3 {2} 3
200 235 Scan D {3} 3 {3} 3
300 1235 {4} 1 {5} 3
400 25 {5} 3
C2 itemset sup C2 itemset
L2 itemset sup {1 2} 1 Scan D {1 2}
{1 3} 2 {1 3} 2 {1 3}
{2 3} 2 {1 5} 1 {1 5}
{2 3} 2 {2 3}
{2 5} 3
{2 5} 3 {2 5}
{3 5} 2
{3 5} 2 {3 5}
C3 itemset Scan D L3 itemset sup Constraint:
{2 3 5} {2 3 5} 2 Sum{S.price} < 5
 The Constrained Apriori Algorithm: Push
an Anti-monotone Constraint Deep
Database D itemset sup.
L1 itemset sup.
TID Items C1 {1} 2 {1} 2
100 134 {2} 3 {2} 3
200 235 Scan D {3} 3 {3} 3
300 1235 {4} 1 {5} 3
400 25 {5} 3
C2 itemset sup C2 itemset
L2 itemset sup {1 2} 1 Scan D {1 2}
{1 3} 2 {1 3} 2 {1 3}
{2 3} 2 {1 5} 1 {1 5}
{2 3} 2 {2 3}
{2 5} 3
{2 5} 3 {2 5}
{3 5} 2
{3 5} 2 {3 5}
C3 itemset Scan D L3 itemset sup Constraint:
{2 3 5} {2 3 5} 2 Sum{S.price} < 5
 The Constrained Apriori Algorithm: Push a
Succinct Constraint Deep
Database D itemset sup.
L1 itemset sup.
TID Items C1 {1} 2 {1} 2
100 134 {2} 3 {2} 3
200 235 Scan D {3} 3 {3} 3
300 1235 {4} 1 {5} 3
400 25 {5} 3
C2 itemset sup C2 itemset
L2 itemset sup {1 2} 1 Scan D {1 2}
{1 3} 2 {1 3} 2 {1 3}
not immediately
{1 5} 1 {1 5} to be used
{2 3} 2
{2 3} 2 {2 3}
{2 5} 3
{2 5} 3 {2 5}
{3 5} 2 {3 5}
{3 5} 2
C3 itemset Scan D L3 itemset sup Constraint:
{2 3 5} {2 3 5} 2 min{S.price } <= 1
 Can Apriori Handle Convertible Constraint?

 A convertible, not monotone nor anti-monotone

nor succinct constraint cannot be pushed deep
into the an Apriori mining algorithm
 Within the level wise framework, no direct
Item Value
pruning based on the constraint can be made a 40
 Itemset df violates constraint C: avg(X)>=25 b 0
c -20
 Since adf satisfies C, Apriori needs df to
d 10
assemble adf, df cannot be pruned
e -30
 But it can be pushed into frequent-pattern f 30
growth framework! g 20
h -10
 Mining With Convertible Constraints
Item Value
 C: avg(X) >= 25, min_sup=2 a 40
f 30
 List items in every transaction in value descending
g 20
order R: <a, f, g, d, b, h, c, e>
d 10
 C is convertible anti-monotone w.r.t. R b 0
 Scan TDB once h -10
c -20
 remove infrequent items
e -30
 Item h is dropped
 Itemsets a and f are good, …
TDB (min_sup=2)
 Projection-based mining
TID Transaction
 Imposing an appropriate order on item projection 10 a, f, d, b, c
 Many tough constraints can be converted into 20 f, g, d, b, c
(anti)-monotone 30 a, f, d, c, e
40 f, g, h, c, e
 Frequent-Pattern Mining: Summary

 Frequent pattern mining—an important task in data mining

 Scalable frequent pattern mining methods
 Apriori (Candidate generation & test)
 Projection-based (FPgrowth, CLOSET+, ...)
 Vertical format approach (CHARM, ...)
 Mining a variety of rules and interesting patterns
 Constraint-based mining
 Mining sequential and structured patterns
 Extensions and applications