HMiner: efficiently mining high utility itemsets

Abstract

High utility itemset mining problem uses the notion of utilities to discover interesting and actionable patterns. Several data structures and heuristic methods have been proposed in the literature to efficiently mine high utility itemsets. This paper advances the state-of-the-art and presents HMiner, a high utility itemset mining method. HMiner utilizes a few novel ideas and presents a compact utility list and virtual hyperlink data structure for storing itemset information. It also makes use of several pruning strategies for efficiently mining high utility itemsets. The proposed ideas were evaluated on a set of benchmark sparse and dense datasets. The execution time improvements ranged from a modest thirty percent to three orders of magnitude across several benchmark datasets. The memory consumption requirements also showed up to an order of magnitude improvement over the state-of-the-art methods. In general, HMiner was found to work well in the dense regions of both sparse and dense benchmark datasets.