FPGA/GPU-based Acceleration for Frequent Itemsets Mining: A Comprehensive Review

In data mining, Frequent Itemsets Mining is a technique used in several domains with notable results. However, the large volume of data in modern datasets increases the processing time of Frequent Itemset Mining algorithms, making them unsuitable for many real-world applications. Accordingly, proposing new methods for Frequent Itemset Mining to obtain frequent itemsets in a realistic amount of time is still an open problem. A successful alternative is to employ hardware acceleration using Graphics Processing Units (GPU) and Field Programmable Gates Arrays (FPGA). In this article, a comprehensive review of the state of the art of Frequent Itemsets Mining hardware acceleration is presented. Several approaches (FPGA and GPU based) were contrasted to show their weaknesses and strengths. This survey gathers the most relevant and the latest research efforts for improving the performance of Frequent Itemsets Mining regarding algorithms advances and modern development platforms. Furthermore, this survey organizes the current research on Frequent Itemsets Mining from the hardware perspective considering the source of the data, the development platform, and the baseline algorithm.

Association Rule Mining Algorithms for Big Data using RDD-ECLAT Algorithms

The revolution in technology for storing and processing big data leads to data intensive computing as a new paradigm. To find the valuable and precise big data knowledge, efficient and scalable data mining techniques are required. In data mining, different techniques are applied depending on the kind of knowledge to be mined. Association rules are generated from the frequent itemsets computed by frequent itemset mining (FIM) algorithms. The problem of designing scalable and efficient frequent itemset mining algorithms on the Spark RDD framework. The research done in this thesis aims to improve the performance (in terms of execution time) of the existing Spark-based frequent itemset mining algorithms and efficiently re-design other frequent itemset mining algorithms on Spark. The particular problem of interest is re-designing the Eclat algorithm in the distributed computing environment of the Spark. The paper proposes and implements a parallel Eclat algorithm using the Spark RDD architecture, dubbed RDD-Eclat. EclatV1 is the earliest version, followed by EclatV2, EclatV3, EclatV4, and EclatV5. Each version is the consequence of a different technique and heuristic being applied to the preceding variant. Following EclatV1, the filtered transaction technique is used, followed by heuristics for equivalence class partitioning in EclatV4 and EclatV5. EclatV2 and EclatV3 are slightly different algorithmically, as are EclatV4 and EclatV5. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets.

A Synopsis Based Approach for Itemset Frequency Estimation over Massive Multi-Transaction Stream

The streams where multiple transactions are associated with the same key are prevalent in practice, e.g., a customer has multiple shopping records arriving at different time. Itemset frequency estimation on such streams is very challenging since sampling based methods, such as the popularly used reservoir sampling, cannot be used. In this article, we propose a novel k -Minimum Value (KMV) synopsis based method to estimate the frequency of itemsets over multi-transaction streams. First, we extract the KMV synopses for each item from the stream. Then, we propose a novel estimator to estimate the frequency of an itemset over the KMV synopses. Comparing to the existing estimator, our method is not only more accurate and efficient to calculate but also follows the downward-closure property. These properties enable the incorporation of our new estimator with existing frequent itemset mining (FIM) algorithm (e.g., FP-Growth) to mine frequent itemsets over multi-transaction streams. To demonstrate this, we implement a KMV synopsis based FIM algorithm by integrating our estimator into existing FIM algorithms, and we prove it is capable of guaranteeing the accuracy of FIM with a bounded size of KMV synopsis. Experimental results on massive streams show our estimator can significantly improve on the accuracy for both estimating itemset frequency and FIM compared to the existing estimators.