Scalable Mining of High-Utility Sequential Patterns With Three-Tier MapReduce Model

High-utility sequential pattern mining (HUSPM) is a hot research topic in recent decades since it combines both sequential and utility properties to reveal more information and knowledge rather than the traditional frequent itemset mining or sequential pattern mining. Several works of HUSPM have been presented but most of them are based on main memory to speed up mining performance. However, this assumption is not realistic and not suitable in large-scale environments since in real industry, the size of the collected data is very huge and it is impossible to fit the data into the main memory of a single machine. In this article, we first develop a parallel and distributed three-stage MapReduce model for mining high-utility sequential patterns based on large-scale databases. Two properties are then developed to hold the correctness and completeness of the discovered patterns in the developed framework. In addition, two data structures called sidset and utility-linked list are utilized in the developed framework to accelerate the computation for mining the required patterns. From the results, we can observe that the designed model has good performance in large-scale datasets in terms of runtime, memory, efficiency of the number of distributed nodes, and scalability compared to the serial HUSP-Span approach.

Mining High Utility Itemsets with Hill Climbing and Simulated Annealing

High utility itemset mining (HUIM) is the task of finding all items set, purchased together, that generate a high profit in a transaction database. In the past, several algorithms have been developed to mine high utility itemsets (HUIs). However, most of them cannot properly handle the exponential search space while finding HUIs when the size of the database and total number of items increases. Recently, evolutionary and heuristic algorithms were designed to mine HUIs, which provided considerable performance improvement. However, they can still have a long runtime and some may miss many HUIs. To address this problem, this article proposes two algorithms for HUIM based on Hill Climbing (HUIM-HC) and Simulated Annealing (HUIM-SA). Both algorithms transform the input database into a bitmap for efficient utility computation and for search space pruning. To improve population diversity, HUIs discovered by evolution are used as target values for the next population instead of keeping the current optimal values in the next population. Through experiments on real-life datasets, it was found that the proposed algorithms are faster than state-of-the-art heuristic and evolutionary HUIM algorithms, that HUIM-SA discovers similar HUIs, and that HUIM-SA evolves linearly with the number of iterations.

Ordering policy estimation for high utility item-sets considering negative item values in large databases

Utility mining with negative item values has recently received interest in the data mining field due to its practical considerations. Previously, the values of utility item-sets have been taken into consideration as positive. However, in real-world applications an item-set may be related to negative item values. This paper presents a method for redesigning the ordering policy by including high utility item-sets with negative items. Initially, utility mining algorithm is used to find high utility item-sets. Then, ordering policy is estimated for high utility items considering defective and non-defective items. A numerical example is illustrated to validate the results