Index-Maxminer: a New Maximal Frequent Itemset Mining Algorithm

Because of the inherent computational complexity, mining the complete frequent itemset in dense datasets remains to be a challenging task. Mining Maximal Frequent Itemset (MFI) is an alternative to address the problem. Set-Enumeration Tree (SET) is a common data structure used in several MFI mining algorithms. For this kind of algorithm, the process of mining MFI’s can also be viewed as the process of searching in set-enumeration tree. To reduce the search space, in this paper, a new algorithm, IndexMaxMiner, for mining MFI is proposed by employing a hybrid search strategy blending breadth-first and depth-first. Firstly, the index array is proposed, and based on bitmap, an algorithm for computing index array is presented. By adding subsume index to frequent items, Index-MaxMiner discovers the candidate MFI’s using breadth-first search at one time, which avoids first-level nodes that would not participate in the answer set and reduces drastically the number of candidate itemsets. Then, for candidate MFI’s, depth-first search strategy is used to generate all MFI’s. Thus, the jumping search in SET is implemented, and the search space is reduced greatly. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is efficient especially for dense datasets.