Mining frequent itemsets using support constraints

Abstract

Interesting patterns often occur at varied levels of support. The classic association mining based on a uniform minimum support, such as Aprio.-i, either misses interesting patterns of low support or suffers from the bottleneck of itemset generation. A better solution is to exploit Support constraints, which specify what minimum support is required for what itemseta, so that only necessary itemsets are generated. In this paper, we present a framework of frequent itemset mining in the presence of support constraints. Our approach is to "push" support constraints into the Apriori it.emset generation so that the "best" minimum support is used for each itemset at run time to preserve the essence of Apriori.