Motivation: Association Rule Mining

• Given a set of transactions, find rules that will predict the

occurrence of an item based on the occurrences of other
items in the transaction

Market-Basket transactions
Example of Association
TID Items Rules
{Diaper}  {Beer},
1 Bread, Milk {Milk, Bread}  {Eggs,Coke},
2 Bread, Diaper, Beer, Eggs {Beer, Bread}  {Milk},
3 Milk, Diaper, Beer, Coke
4 Bread, Milk, Diaper, Beer Implication means co-occurrence,
5 Bread, Milk, Diaper, Coke not causality!

1
 Applications: Association Rule Mining

• *  Maintenance Agreement
– What the store should do to boost Maintenance
Agreement sales
• Home Electronics  *
– What other products should the store stocks up?
• Attached mailing in direct marketing
• Detecting “ping-ponging” of patients
• Marketing and Sales Promotion
• Supermarket shelf management
2
 Definition: Frequent Itemset
• Itemset
– A collection of one or more items
• Example: {Milk, Bread, Diaper}
– k-itemset
• An itemset that contains k items TID Items

• Support count () 1 Bread, Milk

– Frequency of occurrence of an itemset 2 Bread, Diaper, Beer, Eggs
– E.g. ({Milk, Bread,Diaper}) = 2 3 Milk, Diaper, Beer, Coke
• Support 4 Bread, Milk, Diaper, Beer
– Fraction of transactions that contain an 5 Bread, Milk, Diaper, Coke
itemset
– E.g. s({Milk, Bread, Diaper}) = 2/5
• Frequent Itemset
– An itemset whose support is greater
than or equal to a minsup threshold
3
 Definition: Association Rule
• Association Rule TID Items

– An implication expression of the form 1 Bread, Milk

X  Y, where X and Y are itemsets 2 Bread, Diaper, Beer, Eggs
– Example: 3 Milk, Diaper, Beer, Coke
{Milk, Diaper}  {Beer} 4 Bread, Milk, Diaper, Beer
5 Bread, Milk, Diaper, Coke
• Rule Evaluation Metrics
– Support (s) Example:
• Fraction of transactions that contain {Milk, Diaper}  Beer
both X and Y
– Confidence (c)
 (Milk , Diaper, Beer) 2
• Measures how often items in Y s  0.4
appear in transactions that |T| 5
contain X
 (Milk, Diaper, Beer) 2
c  0.67
 (Milk , Diaper) 3
4
 Association Rule Mining Task
• Given a set of transactions T, the goal of
association rule mining is to find all rules having
– support ≥ minsup threshold
– confidence ≥ minconf threshold

• Brute-force approach:
– List all possible association rules
– Compute the support and confidence for each rule
– Prune rules that fail the minsup and minconf
thresholds
 Computationally prohibitive!
5
 Computational Complexity
• Given d unique items:
– Total number of itemsets = 2d
– Total number of possible association rules:

 d 
d1  d  k 
d k
R       
 k   j 
k 1 j 1

3  2  1
d d 1

If d=6, R = 602 rules

6
 Mining Association Rules: Decoupling
TID Items Example of Rules:
1 Bread, Milk
2 Bread, Diaper, Beer, Eggs {Milk,Diaper}  {Beer} (s=0.4, c=0.67)
{Milk,Beer}  {Diaper} (s=0.4, c=1.0)
3 Milk, Diaper, Beer, Coke
{Diaper,Beer}  {Milk} (s=0.4, c=0.67)
4 Bread, Milk, Diaper, Beer
{Beer}  {Milk,Diaper} (s=0.4, c=0.67)
5 Bread, Milk, Diaper, Coke {Diaper}  {Milk,Beer} (s=0.4, c=0.5)
{Milk}  {Diaper,Beer} (s=0.4, c=0.5)
Observations:
• All the above rules are binary partitions of the same itemset:
{Milk, Diaper, Beer}
• Rules originating from the same itemset have identical support but
can have different confidence
• Thus, we may decouple the support and confidence requirements 7
 Mining Association Rules

• Two-step approach:
1. Frequent Itemset Generation
– Generate all itemsets whose support  minsup

2. Rule Generation
– Generate high confidence rules from each frequent itemset,
where each rule is a binary partitioning of a frequent itemset

• Frequent itemset generation is still

computationally expensive

8
 Frequent Itemset Generation
• Brute-force approach:
– Each itemset in the lattice is a candidate frequent itemset
– Count the support of each candidate by scanning the
database
Transactions List of
Candidates
TID Items
1 Bread, Milk
2 Bread, Diaper, Beer, Eggs
N 3 Milk, Diaper, Beer, Coke M
4 Bread, Milk, Diaper, Beer
5 Bread, Milk, Diaper, Coke
w

– Match each transaction against every candidate

– Complexity ~ O(NMw) => Expensive since M = 2d !!! 9
Frequent Itemset Generation Strategies
• Reduce the number of candidates (M)
– Complete search: M=2d
– Use pruning techniques to reduce M

• Reduce the number of transactions (N)

– Reduce size of N as the size of itemset increases
– Use a subsample of N transactions

• Reduce the number of comparisons (NM)

– Use efficient data structures to store the candidates or
transactions
– No need to match every candidate against every
transaction
10
Reducing Number of Candidates: Apriori
• Apriori principle:
– If an itemset is frequent, then all of its subsets must also
be frequent

• Apriori principle holds due to the following property

of the support measure:
X , Y : ( X  Y )  s( X ) s(Y )
– Support of an itemset never exceeds the support of its
subsets
– This is known as the anti-monotone property of support
11
 Illustrating Apriori Principle
null

A B C D E

AB AC AD AE BC BD BE CD CE DE

Found to be
Infrequent
ABC ABD ABE ACD ACE ADE BCD BCE BDE CDE

ABCD ABCE ABDE ACDE BCDE

Pruned
ABCDE 12
supersets
 Illustrating Apriori Principle

Item Count Items (1-itemsets)

Bread 4
Coke 2
Milk 4 Itemset Count Pairs (2-itemsets)
Beer 3 {Bread,Milk} 3
Diaper 4 {Bread,Beer} 2 (No need to generate
Eggs 1
{Bread,Diaper} 3 candidates involving Coke
{Milk,Beer} 2 or Eggs)
{Milk,Diaper} 3
{Beer,Diaper} 3
Minimum Support = 3
Triplets (3-itemsets)

If every subset is considered, Itemset Count

6
C1 + 6C2 + 6C3 = 41 {Bread,Milk,Diaper} 3
With support-based pruning,
6 + 6 + 1 = 13
13
 Apriori Algorithm

• Method:

– Let k=1
– Generate frequent itemsets of length 1
– Repeat until no new frequent itemsets are identified
• Generate length (k+1) candidate itemsets from length k
frequent itemsets
• Prune candidate itemsets containing subsets of length k that
are infrequent
• Count the support of each candidate by scanning the DB
• Eliminate candidates that are infrequent, leaving only those
that are frequent

14
Apriori: Reducing Number of Comparisons
• Candidate counting:
– Scan the database of transactions to determine the support of
each candidate itemset
– To reduce the number of comparisons, store the candidates in a
hash structure
• Instead of matching each transaction against every candidate,
match it against candidates contained in the hashed buckets

Transactions Hash Structure

TID Items
1 Bread, Milk
2 Bread, Diaper, Beer, Eggs
N 3 Milk, Diaper, Beer, Coke k
4 Bread, Milk, Diaper, Beer
5 Bread, Milk, Diaper, Coke
Buckets 15
Apriori: Implementation Using Hash Tree
Suppose you have 15 candidate itemsets of length 3:
{1 4 5}, {1 2 4}, {4 5 7}, {1 2 5}, {4 5 8}, {1 5 9}, {1 3 6}, {2 3 4}, {5 6 7}, {3 4 5}, {3
5 6}, {3 5 7}, {6 8 9}, {3 6 7}, {3 6 8}
You need:
• Hash function
• Max leaf size: max number of itemsets stored in a leaf node
(if number of candidate itemsets exceeds max leaf size, split the node)

Hash function 234

3,6,9 567
1,4,7
145 136
2,5,8 345 356 367
357 368
124 159 689
125 16
457 458
 Apriori: Implementation Using Hash Tree
1 2 3 5 6 transaction

1+ 2356
2+ 356
12+ 356
3+ 56
13+ 56
234
15+ 6 567

145 136
345 356 367
357 368
124 159 689
125
457 458
Match transaction against 11 out of 15 candidates
17
 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!
(Agrawal & Srikant @VLDB’94, Mannila, et al. @ KDD’ 94)
• 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
18
 The Apriori Algorithm—An Example
Supmin = 2 Itemset sup
Database TDB Itemset sup
{A} 2
L1 {A} 2
Tid Items 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 {A, E}
{B, C} 2
{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 19
 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; 20
 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}
21
 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
22
 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
23
Example: Counting Supports of Candidates

Subset function
Transaction: 1 2 3 5 6
3,6,9
1,4,7
2,5,8

1+2356

13+56 234
567
145 345 356 367
136 368
357
12+356
689
124
457 125 159
458

24
 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

25
 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
• A. Savasere, E. Omiecinski, and S. Navathe. An efficient
algorithm for mining association in large databases. In
VLDB’95
26
 DHP: Reduce the Number of Candidates
• A k-itemset whose corresponding hashing bucket count is
below the threshold cannot be frequent
– Candidates: a, b, c, d, e
– Hash entries: {ab, ad, ae} {bd, be, de} …
– Frequent 1-itemset: a, b, d, e
– ab is not a candidate 2-itemset if the sum of count of
{ab, ad, ae} is below support threshold
• J. Park, M. Chen, and P. Yu. An effective hash-based
algorithm for mining association rules. In SIGMOD’95
27
 Apriori: Alternative Search Methods

• Traversal of Itemset Lattice

– General-to-specific vs Specific-to-general
Frequent
itemset Frequent
border null null itemset null
border

.. .. ..
.. .. ..
Frequent
{a1,a2,...,an} {a1,a2,...,an} itemset {a1,a2,...,an}
border
(a) General-to-specific (b) Specific-to-general (c) Bidirectional

28
 Apriori: Alternative Search Methods

• Traversal of Itemset Lattice

– Breadth-first vs Depth-first

(a) Breadth first (b) Depth first

29
 Bottlenecks of Apriori

• Candidate generation can result in huge

candidate sets:
– 104 frequent 1-itemset will generate 107 candidate 2-
itemsets
– To discover a frequent pattern of size 100, e.g., {a1,
a2, …, a100}, one needs to generate 2100 ~ 1030
candidates.
• Multiple scans of database:
– Needs (n +1 ) scans, n is the length of the longest
pattern

30
ECLAT: Another Method for Frequent Itemset
Generation
• ECLAT: for each item, store a list of transaction
ids (tids); vertical data layout

Horizontal
Data Layout Vertical Data Layout
TID Items A B C D E
1 A,B,E 1 1 2 2 1
2 B,C,D 4 2 3 4 3
3 C,E 5 5 4 5 6
4 A,C,D 6 7 8 9
5 A,B,C,D 7 8 9
6 A,E 8 10
7 A,B 9
8 A,B,C
9 A,C,D
10 B
TID-list 31
ECLAT: Another Method for Frequent Itemset
Generation
• Determine support of any k-itemset by intersecting tid-
lists of two of its (k-1) subsets.
A B AB
1 1 1
4 2 5
5
6
 5
7
 7
8
7 8
8 10
9

• 3 traversal approaches:
– top-down, bottom-up and hybrid
• Advantage: very fast support counting
• Disadvantage: intermediate tid-lists may become too
32
large for memory
 FP-growth: Another Method for Frequent
Itemset Generation

• Use a compressed representation of the

database using an FP-tree

• Once an FP-tree has been constructed, it uses a

recursive divide-and-conquer approach to mine
the frequent itemsets

33
 FP-Tree Construction
null
After reading TID=1:
TID Items
1 {A,B} A:1
2 {B,C,D}
3 {A,C,D,E}
B:1
4 {A,D,E}
5 {A,B,C}
6 {A,B,C,D} After reading TID=2:
null
7 {B,C}
8 {A,B,C} A:1 B:1
9 {A,B,D}
10 {B,C,E}
B:1 C:1

34
D:1
 FP-Tree Construction
TID Items
Transaction
1 {A,B}
2 {B,C,D} Database
null
3 {A,C,D,E}
4 {A,D,E}
5 {A,B,C}
A:7 B:3
6 {A,B,C,D}
7 {B,C}
8 {A,B,C}
9 {A,B,D} B:5 C:3
10 {B,C,E}
C:1 D:1

Header table D:1

C:3 E:1
Item Pointer D:1 E:1
A D:1
B E:1
C D:1
D Pointers are used to assist
35
E frequent itemset generation
 FP-growth

Build conditional pattern

null base for E:
P = {(A:1,C:1,D:1),
B:3 (A:1,D:1),
A:7
(B:1,C:1)}
Recursively apply FP-
B:5 C:3 growth on P
C:1 D:1
C:3
D:1
D:1 E:1
D:1 E:1
E:1
D:1
36
 FP-growth
Conditional tree for E:

Conditional Pattern base

null for E:
P = {(A:1,C:1,D:1,E:1),
B:1 (A:1,D:1,E:1),
A:2
(B:1,C:1,E:1)}
Count for E is 3: {E} is
C:1 frequent itemset
C:1 D:1
Recursively apply FP-
growth on P
D:1 E:1
E:1
E:1

37
 FP-growth
Conditional tree for D
within conditional tree
for E:
Conditional pattern base
null for D within conditional
base for E:
P = {(A:1,C:1,D:1),
A:2
(A:1,D:1)}
Count for D is 2: {D,E} is
C:1 D:1 frequent itemset
Recursively apply FP-
growth on P
D:1

38
 FP-growth
Conditional tree for C
within D within E:
Conditional pattern base
null for C within D within E:
P = {(A:1,C:1)}
A:1 Count for C is 1: {C,D,E}
is NOT frequent itemset

C:1

39
 FP-growth
Conditional tree for A
within D within E:
Count for A is 2: {A,D,E}
null is frequent itemset
Next step:
A:2
Construct conditional tree
C within conditional tree
E
Continue until exploring
conditional tree for A
(which has only node A)

40
 Benefits of the FP-tree Structure
• Performance study shows
– FP-growth is an order of
magnitude faster than
Apriori, and is also faster 100

than tree-projection 90

80
D1 FP-grow th runtime
D1 Apriori runtime

• Reasoning 70

Run time(sec.)
60

– No candidate generation, 50

no candidate test 40

30

– Use compact data 20

10
structure 0
0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3
– Eliminate repeated Support threshold(%)

database scan
– Basic operation is counting
and FP-tree building

41
 Complexity of Association Mining
• Choice of minimum support threshold
– lowering support threshold results in more frequent itemsets
– this may increase number of candidates and max length of
frequent itemsets
• Dimensionality (number of items) of the data set
– more space is needed to store support count of each item
– if number of frequent items also increases, both computation and
I/O costs may also increase
• Size of database
– since Apriori makes multiple passes, run time of algorithm may
increase with number of transactions
• Average transaction width
– transaction width increases with denser data sets
– This may increase max length of frequent itemsets and traversals
of hash tree (number of subsets in a transaction increases with its
width)
42
 Maximal Frequent Itemset
An itemset is maximal frequent if none of its immediate supersets
is frequent
null

Maximal A B C D E
Itemsets

AB AC AD AE BC BD BE CD CE DE

ABC ABD ABE ACD ACE ADE BCD BCE BDE CDE

ABCD ABCE ABDE ACDE BCDE

Infrequent
Itemsets Border
ABCD 43
E
 Closed Itemset
• Problem with maximal frequent itemsets:
– Support of their subsets is not known – additional DB scans are
needed
• An itemset is closed if none of its immediate supersets
has the same support as the itemset
Itemset Support
{A} 4
TID Items Itemset Support
{B} 5
1 {A,B} {A,B,C} 2
{C} 3
2 {B,C,D} {A,B,D} 3
{D} 4
3 {A,B,C,D} {A,C,D} 2
{A,B} 4
4 {A,B,D} {B,C,D} 2
{A,C} 2 {A,B,C,D} 2
5 {A,B,C,D}
{A,D} 3
{B,C} 3
{B,D} 4
{C,D} 3 44
 Maximal vs Closed Frequent Itemsets
Minimum support = 2 null Closed but
not
maximal
124 123 1234 245 345 Closed and
A B C D E maximal

12 124 24 4 123 2 3 24 34 45
AB AC AD AE BC BD BE CD CE DE

12 2 24 4 4 2 3 4
ABC ABD ABE ACD ACE ADE BCD BCE BDE CDE

TID Items
# Closed = 9
1 ABC 2 4
ABCD ABCE ABDE ACDE BCDE
# Maximal = 4
2 ABCD
3 BCE
ABCDE
4 ACDE
45
5 DE
Maximal vs Closed Itemsets

Frequent
Itemsets

Closed
Frequent
Itemsets

Maximal
Frequent
Itemsets

46
 Rule Generation

• Given a frequent itemset L, find all non-empty

subsets f  L such that f  L – f satisfies the
minimum confidence requirement
– If {A,B,C,D} is a frequent itemset, candidate rules:
ABC D, ABD C, ACD B, BCD A,
A BCD, B ACD, C ABD, D ABC
AB CD, AC  BD, AD  BC, BC AD,
BD AC, CD AB,

• If |L| = k, then there are 2k – 2 candidate

association rules (ignoring L   and   L)
47
 Rule Generation
• How to efficiently generate rules from frequent
itemsets?
– In general, confidence does not have an anti-monotone
property
c(ABC D) can be larger or smaller than c(AB D)

– But confidence of rules generated from the same itemset

has an anti-monotone property
– e.g., L = {A,B,C,D}:

c(ABC  D)  c(AB  CD)  c(A  BCD)

• Confidence is anti-monotone w.r.t. number of items on the RHS of

the rule
48
 Rule Generation
Lattice of rules
ABCD=>{ }
Low
Confidence
Rule
BCD=>A ACD=>B ABD=>C ABC=>D

CD=>AB BD=>AC BC=>AD AD=>BC AC=>BD AB=>CD

D=>ABC C=>ABD B=>ACD A=>BCD

Pruned
Rules 49