Finding minimum representative pattern sets

Abstract

Frequent pattern mining often produces an enormous number of frequent patterns, which imposes a great challenge on understanding and further analysis of the generated patterns. This calls for finding a small number of representative patterns to best approximate all other patterns. An ideal approach should 1) produce a minimum number of representative patterns; 2) restore the support of all patterns with error guarantee; and 3) have good efficiency. Few existing approaches can satisfy all the three requirements. In this paper, we develop two algorithms, MinRPset and FlexRPset, for finding minimum representative pattern sets. Both algorithms provide error guarantee. MinRPset produces the smallest solution that we can possibly have in practice under the given problem setting, and it takes a reasonable amount of time to finish. FlexRPset is developed based on MinRPset. It provides one extra parameter K to allow users to make a trade-off between result size and efficiency. Our experiment results show that MinRPset and FlexRPset produce fewer representative patterns than RPlocal - -an efficient algorithm that is developed for solving the same problem. FlexRPset can be slightly faster than RPlocal when K is small. © 2012 ACM.