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Apriori Algorithm: 1 Setting

The Apriori algorithm is used for frequent item set mining and association rule learning in transactional databases. It works by identifying frequent individual items in the database and extending them to larger item sets as long as they appear often enough together across transactions based on a minimum support threshold. It generates candidate item sets and then scans the database to determine truly frequent item sets. The algorithm uses a bottom-up approach to efficiently count candidate frequencies and prune infrequent items and sets.

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73 views

Apriori Algorithm: 1 Setting

The Apriori algorithm is used for frequent item set mining and association rule learning in transactional databases. It works by identifying frequent individual items in the database and extending them to larger item sets as long as they appear often enough together across transactions based on a minimum support threshold. It generates candidate item sets and then scans the database to determine truly frequent item sets. The algorithm uses a bottom-up approach to efficiently count candidate frequencies and prune infrequent items and sets.

Uploaded by

Bobby Jasuja
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Apriori algorithm

Apriori(T, )
L1 {large 1 itemsets}

Apriori[1] is an algorithm for frequent item set mining


and association rule learning over transactional databases.
It proceeds by identifying the frequent individual items in
the database and extending them to larger and larger item
sets as long as those item sets appear suciently often
in the database. The frequent item sets determined by
Apriori can be used to determine association rules which
highlight general trends in the database: this has applications in domains such as market basket analysis.

k2
while Lk1 =
Ck {a {b} | a Lk1 b

Lk1 b a}

for transactions t T
Ct {c | c Ck c t}
for candidates c Ct
count[c] count[c] + 1
Lk {c | c Ck count[c] }

Setting

k k+1

return
Lk

Apriori is designed to operate on databases containing


k
transactions (for example, collections of items bought by
customers, or details of a website frequentation). Other
algorithms are designed for nding association rules in 2 Examples
data having no transactions (Winepi and Minepi), or having no timestamps (DNA sequencing). Each transaction 2.1 Example 1
is seen as a set of items (an itemset). Given a threshold C
, the Apriori algorithm identies the item sets which are Consider the following database, where each row is a
subsets of at least C transactions in the database.
transaction and each cell is an individual item of the transApriori uses a bottom up approach, where frequent sub- action:
sets are extended one item at a time (a step known as can- The association rules that can be determined from this
didate generation), and groups of candidates are tested database are the following:
against the data. The algorithm terminates when no further successful extensions are found.
1. 100% of sets with alpha also contain beta
Apriori uses breadth-rst search and a Hash tree struc2. 50% of sets with alpha, beta also have epsilon
ture to count candidate item sets eciently. It generates
candidate item sets of length k from item sets of length
3. 50% of sets with alpha, beta also have theta
k 1 . Then it prunes the candidates which have an infrequent sub pattern. According to the downward closure
lemma, the candidate set contains all frequent k -length we can also illustrate this through a variety of examples
item sets. After that, it scans the transaction database to
determine frequent item sets among the candidates.

2.2 Example 2

The pseudo code for the algorithm is given below for a


transaction database T , and a support threshold of .
Usual set theoretic notation is employed, though note that
T is a multiset. Ck is the candidate set for level k . At
each step, the algorithm is assumed to generate the candidate sets from the large item sets of the preceding level,
heeding the downward closure lemma. count[c] accesses
a eld of the data structure that represents candidate set
c , which is initially assumed to be zero. Many details
are omitted below, usually the most important part of the
implementation is the data structure used for storing the
candidate sets, and counting their frequencies.

Assume that a large supermarket tracks sales data by


stock-keeping unit (SKU) for each item: each item, such
as butter or bread, is identied by a numerical SKU.
The supermarket has a database of transactions where
each transaction is a set of SKUs that were bought together.
Let the database of transactions consist of following itemsets:
We will use Apriori to determine the frequent item sets
of this database. To do so, we will say that an item set
1

is frequent if it appears in at least 3 transactions of the


database: the value 3 is the support threshold.

EXTERNAL LINKS

5 External links

The rst step of Apriori is to count up the number of occurrences, called the support, of each member item separately, by scanning the database a rst time. We obtain
the following result

ARtool, GPL Java association rule mining application with GUI, oering implementations of multiple
algorithms for discovery of frequent patterns and extraction of association rules (includes Apriori)

All the itemsets of size 1 have a support of at least 3, so


they are all frequent.

SPMF: Open-source java implementations of more


than 50 algorithms for frequent itemsets mining, association rule mining and sequential pattern mining. It oers Apriori and several variations such
as AprioriClose, UApriori, AprioriInverse, AprioriRare, MSApriori, AprioriTID, etc., and other more
ecient algorithms such as FPGrowth.

The next step is to generate a list of all pairs of the frequent items:
The pairs {1,2}, {2,3}, {2,4}, and {3,4} all meet or exceed the minimum support of 3, so they are frequent.
The pairs {1,3} and {1,4} are not. Now, because {1,3}
and {1,4} are not frequent, any larger set which contains
{1,3} or {1,4} cannot be frequent. In this way, we can
prune sets: we will now look for frequent triples in the
database, but we can already exclude all the triples that
contain one of these two pairs:
In the example, there are no frequent triplets -- {2,3,4} is
below the minimal threshold, and the other triplets were
excluded because they were super sets of pairs that were
already below the threshold.
We have thus determined the frequent sets of items in
the database, and illustrated how some items were not
counted because one of their subsets was already known
to be below the threshold.

Limitations

Apriori, while historically signicant, suers from a


number of ineciencies or trade-os, which have
spawned other algorithms. Candidate generation generates large numbers of subsets (the algorithm attempts to
load up the candidate set with as many as possible before
each scan). Bottom-up subset exploration (essentially a
breadth-rst traversal of the subset lattice) nds any maximal subset S only after all 2|S| 1 of its proper subsets.
Later algorithms such as Max-Miner[2] try to identify the
maximal frequent item sets without enumerating their
subsets, and perform jumps in the search space rather
than a purely bottom-up approach.

References

[1] Rakesh Agrawal and Ramakrishnan Srikant Fast algorithms for mining association rules in large databases.
Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on
Very Large Data Bases, VLDB, pages 487-499, Santiago,
Chile, September 1994.
[2] Bayardo Jr, Roberto J. (1998). Eciently mining long
patterns from databases. ACM 27 (2).

Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

6.1

Text

Apriori algorithm Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apriori%20algorithm?oldid=637047202 Contributors: Timo Honkasalo, Michael


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Dexbot, Adrek14, John mikol, 21t cog, Stefpac and Anonymous: 93

6.2

Images

File:Edit-clear.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f2/Edit-clear.svg License: Public domain Contributors: The


Tango! Desktop Project. Original artist:
The people from the Tango! project. And according to the meta-data in the le, specically: Andreas Nilsson, and Jakub Steiner (although
minimally).

6.3

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