Mining Frequent Patterns, Association and

Correlations: Basic Concepts and Methods

 Basic Concepts

 Frequent Itemset Mining Methods

 Which Patterns Are Interesting?—Pattern

Evaluation Methods

 Summary

1
 What Is Frequent Pattern Analysis?
 Frequent pattern: a pattern (a set of items, subsequences, substructures,
etc.) that occurs frequently in a data set
 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.

2
 Why Is Freq. Pattern Mining Important?

 Freq. pattern: An intrinsic and important property of

datasets
 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: discriminative, frequent pattern analysis

 Cluster analysis: frequent pattern-based clustering

 Data warehousing: iceberg cube and cube-gradient

 Semantic data compression: fascicles

 Broad applications

3
 Basic Concepts: Frequent Patterns

Tid Items bought  itemset: A set of one or more

10 Beer, Nuts, Diaper items
20 Beer, Coffee, Diaper  k-itemset X = {x1, …, xk}
30 Beer, Diaper, Eggs
 (absolute) support, or, support
40 Nuts, Eggs, Milk count of X: Frequency or
50 Nuts, Coffee, Diaper, Eggs, Milk occurrence of an itemset X
Customer Customer
 (relative) support, s, is the
buys both buys diaper fraction of transactions that
contains X (i.e., the probability
that a transaction contains X)
 An itemset X is frequent if X’s
support is no less than a minsup
Customer
buys beer
threshold

4
 Basic Concepts: Association Rules

 Find all the rules X  Y with

minimum support and confidence
 support, s, probability that a
transaction contains X  Y
 confidence, c, conditional
probability that a transaction
Customer
Customer
buys both
buys
diaper
having X also contains Y
 confidence (A  B) P(B|A)
Customer
Let minsup = 50%, minconf = 50%
buys beer
Freq. Pat.: Beer:3, Nuts:3, Diaper:4, Eggs:3,
{Beer, Diaper}:3
 Association rules: (many more!)
 Beer  Diaper (60%, 100%)
 Diaper  Beer (60%, 75%)
5
6
7
8
 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

9
 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?
 !! large / complex set
10
Computational Complexity of Frequent Itemset
Mining
 How many itemsets are potentially to be generated in the worst case?
 The number of frequent itemsets to be generated is senstive to the
minsup threshold
 When minsup is low, there exist potentially an exponential number
of frequent itemsets
 The worst case: MN where M: # distinct items, and N: max length of
transactions
 The worst case complexty vs. the expected probability
 Ex. Suppose Walmart has 104 kinds of products
 The chance to pick up one product 10-4
 The chance to pick up a particular set of 10 products: ~10-40
 What is the chance this particular set of 10 products to be frequent
103 times in 109 transactions?

11
Chapter 5: Mining Frequent Patterns, Association
and Correlations: Basic Concepts and Methods

 Basic Concepts

 Frequent Itemset Mining Methods

 Which Patterns Are Interesting?—Pattern

Evaluation Methods

 Summary

12
Scalable Frequent Itemset Mining Methods

 Apriori: A Candidate Generation-and-Test

Approach

 Improving the Efficiency of Apriori

 FPGrowth: A Frequent Pattern-Growth Approach

 ECLAT: Frequent Pattern Mining with Vertical

Data Format
13
The Downward Closure Property and Scalable
Mining Methods
 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

 Freq. pattern growth

 Vertical data format approach

14
Apriori: A Candidate Generation & 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

15
 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
16
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;
17
 Implementation of Apriori

 How to generate candidates?

 Step 1: self-joining Lk
 Step 2: pruning
 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}
18
 How to Count Supports of Candidates?

 Why counting supports of candidates a problem?

 The total number of candidates can be very huge
 One transaction may contain many candidates
 Method:
 Candidate itemsets are stored in a hash-tree
 Leaf node of hash-tree contains a list of itemsets and
counts
 Interior node contains a hash table
 Subset function: finds all the candidates contained in
a transaction

19
Scalable Frequent Itemset Mining Methods

 Apriori: A Candidate Generation-and-Test Approach

 Improving the Efficiency of Apriori

 FPGrowth: A Frequent Pattern-Growth Approach

 ECLAT: Frequent Pattern Mining with Vertical Data Format

 Mining Close Frequent Patterns and Maxpatterns

20
 Further Improvement of the Apriori Method

 Major computational 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

21
 Partition: Scan Database Only Twice
 Any itemset that is potentially frequent in DB must be
frequent in at least one of the partitions of DB
 Scan 1: partition database and find local frequent

patterns
 Scan 2: consolidate global frequent patterns

DB1 + DB2 + + DBk = DB

sup1(i) < σDB1 sup2(i) < σDB2 supk(i) < σDBk sup(i) < σDB
 DHP: Reduce the Number of Candidates

 Direct hashing and pruning

 A k-itemset whose corresponding hashing bucket count is below the
threshold cannot be frequent
 Candidates: a, b, c, d, e count itemsets
35 {ab, ad, ae}
 Hash entries 88 {bd, be, de}
 {ab, ad, ae} . .
{bd, be, de}
. .
 . .
 …
102 {yz, qs, wt}
 Frequent 1-itemset: a, b, d, e
Hash Table
 ab is not a candidate 2-itemset if the sum of count of {ab, ad, ae}
is below support threshold

23
 Sampling for Frequent Patterns

 Select a sample of original database, mine frequent

patterns within sample using Apriori
 Scan database once to verify frequent itemsets found in
sample, only borders of closure of frequent patterns are
checked
 Example: check abcd instead of ab, ac, …, etc.
 Scan database again to find missed frequent patterns

24
 DIC: Reduce Number of Scans

 Dynamic Itemset Counting

ABCD
 Once both A and D are determined
frequent, the counting of AD begins
ABC ABD ACD BCD  Once all length-2 subsets of BCD are
determined frequent, the counting of BCD
begins
AB AC BC AD BD CD
Transactions
1-itemsets
A B C D
Apriori 2-itemsets
…
{}
Itemset lattice 1-itemsets
2-items
DIC 3-items

25
Scalable Frequent Itemset Mining Methods

 Apriori: A Candidate Generation-and-Test Approach

 Improving the Efficiency of Apriori

 FPGrowth: A Frequent Pattern-Growth Approach

 ECLAT: Frequent Pattern Mining with Vertical Data Format

 Mining Close Frequent Patterns and Maxpatterns

26
 Pattern-Growth Approach: Mining Frequent
Patterns Without Candidate Generation
 Bottlenecks of the Apriori approach
 Breadth-first (i.e., level-wise) search
 Candidate generation and test
 Often generates a huge number of candidates
 The FPGrowth Approach
 Depth-first search
 Avoid explicit candidate generation
 Major philosophy: Grow long patterns from short ones using local
frequent items only
 “abc” is a frequent pattern
 Get all transactions having “abc”, i.e., project DB on abc: DB|abc
 “d” is a local frequent item in DB|abc  abcd is a frequent pattern
27
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 (single Item frequency head f:4 c:1
item pattern) f 4
c 4 c:3 b:1 b:1
2. Sort frequent items in a 3
frequency descending b 3 a:3 p:1
order, f-list m 3
p 3
3. Scan DB again, construct m:2 b:1
FP-tree
F-list = f-c-a-b-m-p p:2 m:1
28
 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

29
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

30
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
31
 Recursion: Mining Each Conditional FP-tree
{}

{} Cond. pattern base of “am”: (fc:3) f:3

c:3
f:3
am-conditional FP-tree
c:3 {}
Cond. pattern base of “cm”: (f:3)
a:3 f:3
m-conditional FP-tree
cm-conditional FP-tree

{}

Cond. pattern base of “cam”: (f:3) f:3

cam-conditional FP-tree

32
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
33
 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)

34
The Frequent Pattern Growth Mining Method

 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

35
 Scaling FP-growth by Database Projection

 What about if FP-tree cannot fit in memory?

 DB projection
 First partition a database into a set of projected DBs
 Then construct and mine FP-tree for each projected DB
 Parallel projection vs. partition projection techniques
 Parallel projection
 Project the DB in parallel for each frequent item
 Parallel projection is space costly
 All the partitions can be processed in parallel
 Partition projection
 Partition the DB based on the ordered frequent items
 Passing the unprocessed parts to the subsequent partitions

36
 Partition-Based Projection

 Parallel projection needs a lot Tran. DB

of disk space fcamp
fcabm
 Partition projection saves it fb
cbp
fcamp

p-proj DB m-proj DB b-proj DB a-proj DB c-proj DB f-proj DB

fcam fcab f fc f …
cb fca cb … …
fcam fca …

am-proj DB cm-proj DB
fc f …
fc f
fc f
37
Performance of FPGrowth in Large Datasets

100
140
90 D1 FP-grow th runtime D2 FP-growth
80
D1 Apriori runtime 120 D2 TreeProjection
70 100

Runtime (sec.)
Run time(sec.)

60
80
50 Data set T25I20D10K Data set T25I20D100K
40 60

30 40
20
20
10
0 0
0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 0 0.5 1 1.5 2
Support threshold(%)
Support threshold (%)

FP-Growth vs. Apriori FP-Growth vs. Tree-Projection

38
Advantages of the Pattern Growth Approach

 Divide-and-conquer:
 Decompose both the mining task and DB according to the
frequent patterns obtained so far
 Lead 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
 A good open-source implementation and refinement of FPGrowth
 FPGrowth+ (Grahne and J. Zhu, FIMI'03)

39
 Further Improvements of Mining Methods

 AFOPT
 A “push-right” method for mining condensed frequent pattern
(CFP) tree
 Carpenter
 Mine data sets with small rows but numerous columns
 Construct a row-enumeration tree for efficient ining
 FPgrowth+
 Efficiently Using Prefix-Trees in Mining Frequent Itemsets, Proc.
ICDM'03 Int. Workshop on Frequent Itemset Mining
Implementations
 TD-Close

40
Extension of Pattern Growth Mining Methodology

 Mining closed frequent itemsets and max-patterns

 CLOSET , FPclose, and FPMax

 Mining sequential patterns

 PrefixSpan , CloSpan BIDE

 Mining graph patterns

 gSpan , CloseGraph

 Constraint-based mining of frequent patterns

 Convertible constraints , gPrune

 Computing iceberg data cubes with complex measures

 H-tree, H-cubing, and Star-cubing

 Pattern-growth-based Clustering
 MaPle

 Pattern-Growth-Based Classification
 Mining frequent and discriminative patterns

41
42
Scalable Frequent Itemset Mining Methods

 Apriori: A Candidate Generation-and-Test Approach

 Improving the Efficiency of Apriori

 FPGrowth: A Frequent Pattern-Growth Approach

 ECLAT: Frequent Pattern Mining with Vertical Data Format

 Mining Close Frequent Patterns and Maxpatterns

43
 ECLAT: Mining by Exploring Vertical Data
Format
 Vertical format: t(AB) = {T11, T25, …}
 tid-list: list of trans.-ids containing an itemset
 Deriving frequent patterns based on vertical intersections
 t(X) = t(Y): X and Y always happen together
 t(X)  t(Y): transaction having X always has Y
 Using diffset to accelerate mining
 Only keep track of differences of tids
 t(X) = {T1, T2, T3}, t(XY) = {T1, T3}
 Diffset (XY, X) = {T2}
 Eclat (Zaki et al. @KDD’97)
 Mining Closed patterns using vertical format: CHARM (Zaki &
Hsiao@SDM’02)
44
Scalable Frequent Itemset Mining Methods

 Apriori: A Candidate Generation-and-Test Approach

 Improving the Efficiency of Apriori

 FPGrowth: A Frequent Pattern-Growth Approach

 ECLAT: Frequent Pattern Mining with Vertical Data Format

 Mining Close Frequent Patterns and Maxpatterns

45
 Mining Frequent Closed Patterns: CLOSET

 Flist: list of all frequent items in support ascending order

 Flist: d-a-f-e-c Min_sup=2
TID Items
 Divide search space
10 a, c, d, e, f
 Patterns having d 20 a, b, e
30 c, e, f
 Patterns having d but no a, etc. 40 a, c, d, f
50 c, e, f
 Find frequent closed pattern recursively
 Every transaction having d also has cfa  cfad is a
frequent closed pattern
 J. Pei, J. Han & R. Mao. “CLOSET: An Efficient Algorithm for
Mining Frequent Closed Itemsets", DMKD'00.
CLOSET+: Mining Closed Itemsets by Pattern-Growth

 Itemset merging: if Y appears in every occurrence of X, then Y

is merged with X
 Sub-itemset pruning: if Y ‫ כ‬X, and sup(X) = sup(Y), X and all of
X’s descendants in the set enumeration tree can be pruned
 Hybrid tree projection
 Bottom-up physical tree-projection
 Top-down pseudo tree-projection
 Item skipping: if a local frequent item has the same support in
several header tables at different levels, one can prune it from
the header table at higher levels
 Efficient subset checking
 MaxMiner: Mining Max-Patterns
 1st scan: find frequent items Tid Items
10 A, B, C, D, E
 A, B, C, D, E 20 B, C, D, E,
 2nd scan: find support for 30 A, C, D, F

 AB, AC, AD, AE, ABCDE

BC, BD, BE, BCDE
Potential


 CD, CE, CDE, DE max-patterns

 Since BCDE is a max-pattern, no need to check BCD, BDE,
CDE in later scan
 CHARM: Mining by Exploring Vertical Data
Format
 Vertical format: t(AB) = {T11, T25, …}
 tid-list: list of trans.-ids containing an itemset
 Deriving closed patterns based on vertical intersections
 t(X) = t(Y): X and Y always happen together
 t(X)  t(Y): transaction having X always has Y
 Using diffset to accelerate mining
 Only keep track of differences of tids
 t(X) = {T1, T2, T3}, t(XY) = {T1, T3}
 Diffset (XY, X) = {T2}
Visualization of Association Rules: Plane Graph

50
Visualization of Association Rules: Rule Graph

51
Visualization of Association Rules
(SGI/MineSet 3.0)

52
Chapter 5: Mining Frequent Patterns, Association
and Correlations: Basic Concepts and Methods

 Basic Concepts

 Frequent Itemset Mining Methods

 Which Patterns Are Interesting?—Pattern

Evaluation Methods

 Summary

53
 Interestingness Measure: Correlations (Lift)
 play basketball  eat cereal [40%, 66.7%] is misleading
 The overall % of students eating cereal is 75% > 66.7%.
 play basketball  not eat cereal [20%, 33.3%] is more accurate,
although with lower support and confidence
 Measure of dependent/correlated events: lift

P( A B) Basketball Not basketball Sum (row)

lift  Cereal 2000 1750 3750
P( A) P( B)
Not cereal 1000 250 1250
2000 / 5000
lift ( B, C )   0.89 Sum(col.) 3000 2000 5000
3000 / 5000 * 3750 / 5000
1000 / 5000
lift ( B, C )   1.33
3000 / 5000 *1250 / 5000

54
 Are lift and 2 Good Measures of Correlation?

 “Buy walnuts  buy

milk [1%, 80%]” is
misleading if 85% of
customers buy milk
 Support and confidence
are not good to indicate
correlations
 Over 20 interestingness
measures have been
proposed (see Tan,
Kumar, Sritastava
@KDD’02)
 Which are good ones?

55
Null-Invariant Measures

56
 Comparison of Interestingness Measures

 Null-(transaction) invariance is crucial for correlation analysis

 Lift and 2 are not null-invariant
 5 null-invariant measures

Milk No Milk Sum (row)

Coffee m, c ~m, c c
No Coffee m, ~c ~m, ~c ~c
Sum(col.) m ~m 

Null-transactions Kulczynski
w.r.t. m and c measure (1927) Null-invariant

February 17, 2025 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques Subtle: They disagree57
 Analysis of DBLP Coauthor Relationships
Recent DB conferences, removing balanced associations, low sup, etc.

Advisor-advisee relation: Kulc: high,

coherence: low, cosine: middle

58
 Which Null-Invariant Measure Is Better?
 IR (Imbalance Ratio): measure the imbalance of two
itemsets A and B in rule implications

 Kulczynski and Imbalance Ratio (IR) together present a

clear picture for all the three datasets D4 through D6
 D4 is balanced & neutral

 D5 is imbalanced & neutral

 D6 is very imbalanced & neutral