Mining high-utility itemsets based on particle swarm optimization

High-utility itemset mining (HUIM) is a critical issue in recent years since it can be used to reveal the profitable products by considering both the quantity and profit factors instead of frequent itemset mining (FIM) or association-rule mining (ARM). Several algorithms have been presented to mine high-utility itemsets (HUIs) and most of the designed algorithms have to handle the exponential search space for discovering HUIs when the number of distinct items and the size of database are very large. In the past, a heuristic HUPEumu-GRAM algorithmwas proposed to mine HUIs based on genetic algorithm (GA). For the evolutionary computation (EC) techniques of particle swarm optimization (PSO), it only requires fewer parameters compared to the GA-based approach. Since the traditional PSO mechanism is used to handle the continuous problem, in this paper, the discrete PSO is adopted to encode the particles as the binary variables. An efficient PSO-based algorithm namely HUIM-BPSOsig is proposed to efficiently find HUIs. It first sets the number of discovered high-transaction-weighted utilization 1-itemsets (1-HTWUIs) as the size of a particle based on transaction-weighted utility (TWU) model, which can greatly reduce the combinational problem in evolution process. The sigmoid function is adopted in the updating process of the particles of the designed HUIM-BPSOsig algorithm. Substantial experiments on real-life datasets show that the proposed algorithm has better results compared to the state-of-the-art GA-based algorithm. & 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.