Parallel Incremental Frequent Itemset Mining for Large Data

Frequent itemset mining (FIM) is a popular data mining issue adopted in many fields, such as commodity recommendation in the retail industry, log analysis in web searching, and query recommendation (or related search). A large number of FIM algorithms have been proposed to obtain better performance, including parallelized algorithms for processing large data volumes. Besides, incremental FIM algorithms are also proposed to deal with incremental database updates. However, most of these incremental algorithms have low parallelism, causing low efficiency on huge databases. This paper presents two parallel incremental FIM algorithms called IncMiningPFP and IncBuildingPFP, implemented on the MapReduce framework. IncMiningPFP preserves the FP-tree mining results of the original pass, and utilizes them for incremental calculations. In particular, we propose a method to generate a partial FP-tree in the incremental pass, in order to avoid unnecessary mining work. Further, some of the incremental parallel tasks can be omitted when the inserted transactions include fewer items. IncbuildingPFP preserves the CanTrees built in the original pass, and then adds new transactions to them during the incremental passes. Our experimental results show that IncMiningPFP can achieve significant speedup over PFP (Parallel FPGrowth) and a sequential incremental algorithm (CanTree) in most cases of incremental input database, and in other cases IncBuildingPFP can achieve it.