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unacceptable, similar to the problem of FIM applied to social
networks or large bioinformatics datasets [5].
To deal with the performance bottleneck of exact
approaches, bio-inspired algorithms have been applied for
HUIM. For example, the genetic algorithm (GA) has been
used to mine HUIs by Kannimuthu and Premalatha [14], and
particle swarm optimization (PSO) [21], [22] has recently
been applied to the mining of HUIs. These existing HUIM
algorithms based on bio-inspired computing follow the
traditional routines of the original GA and PSO algorithm.
That is, the optimal values of one population are maintained
in the next population. However, HUIM is different from
problems in which there are relatively few best values—all
itemsets with utilities no lower than the minimum threshold
must be discovered. Because the distribution of HUIs is not
even, searching with the best values from the previous
II. PROBLEM STATEMENT AND RELATED WORK
This section briefly describes the problem of HUIM before
reviewing related work in the area of HUIM and bio-inspired
algorithms for itemset mining.
A. PROBLEM OF HUIM
Let I = {i1, i2,…, iM} be a finite set of items. Then, set X  I
is called an itemset; an itemset containing k items is called a
k-itemset. Let D = {T1, T2, …, TN} be a transaction database.
Each transaction TiD, with unique identifier tid, is a subset
of I.
The internal utility q(ip, Td) represents the quantity of item
ip in transaction Td. The external utility p(ip) is the unit profit
value of item ip. The utility of item ip in transaction Td is
defined as u(ip, Td) = p(ip)  q(ip, Td).
The utility of itemset X in transaction Td is defined as


population as targets may mean that some results are missed
u( X , Td )  u(ip , Td ) (1)
within a certain number of iterations. i p X  X Td
To solve this problem, we propose a novel bio-inspired-
algorithm-based HUIM framework (Bio-HUIF) to discover The utility of itemset X in D is defined as
HUIs. In this framework, rather than choosing only those
HUIs with the highest utility values in the current population, u( X )  
X Td Td D
u( X ,Td ) (2)
roulette wheel selection is applied to all the discovered HUIs
to determine the initial target of the next population. Based
The transaction utility (TU) of transaction Td is defined as
on Bio-HUIF, three HUIM algorithms are proposed: Bio-
TU(Td)=u(Td, Td).
HUIF-GA, Bio-HUIF-PSO, and Bio-HUIF-BA. These
To perform HUIM, the minimum utility threshold ,
employ GA, PSO, and the bat algorithm (BA), respectively.
specified by the user, is defined as a percentage of the total
For each algorithm, every discovered HUI could be chosen
TU values of the database, whereas the minimum utility value
as the initial target of the next population according to the
is defined as
ratio of its utility to the total utilities of all discovered HUIs.
The major contributions of this work are summarized as
follows.
min_util =   TU (T )
Td D
d (3)

First, a novel framework for HUIM is proposed based on

bio-inspired algorithms. The strategy of selecting discovered
HUIs probabilistically, instead of maintaining the best values
from population to population, improves the diversity of
solutions within a limited number of iterations.
Second, under the proposed framework, three new
algorithms are proposed based on GA, PSO, and BA,
An itemset X is called an HUI if u(X)  min_util.
Given a transaction database D, the task of HUIM is to
determine all itemsets that have utilities no less than min_util.
The transaction-weighted utilization (TWU) of itemset X
[23] is the sum of the transaction utilities of all the
transactions containing X, which is defined as

respectively. Besides the standard concepts of the three bio-
inspired algorithms, we use the strategies of bitmap database
representation, promising encoding vector checking, and bit
difference sets to accelerate the process of HUI discovery.
Third, extensive experiments have been conducted on real
datasets to validate the performance of the three algorithms.
The results show that the proposed approach outperforms
existing bio-inspired HUIM algorithms in terms of efficiency,
the number of discovered HUIs, and convergence speed.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In
Section II, we describe the problem of HUIM and introduce
some related work. The proposed framework is presented in
Section III. The three algorithms based on Bio-HUIF are
explained in Sections IV–VI, respectively. Experimental
results are presented and analyzed in Section VII. Finally, we
draw our conclusions in Section VIII.

TWU( X )  TU(Td ) (4)
X Td Td D
X is a high transaction-weighted utilization itemset
(HTWUI) if TWU(X)  min_util; otherwise, X is a low
transaction-weighted utilization itemset (LTWUI). An
HTWUI/LTWUI with k items is called a k-HTWUI/k-
LTWUI.
Consider the transaction database in Table 1 and the profit
table in Table 2. For convenience, we write an itemset {c, e}
as ce. In the example database, the utility of item e in
transaction T1 is u(e, T1) = 16 = 6, the utility of itemset ce in
transaction T1 is u(ce, T1) = u(c, T1) + u(e, T1) = 18 + 6 = 24,
and the utility of itemset ce in the transaction database is u(ce)
= u(ce, T1) + u(ce, T3) + u(ce, T5) + u(ce, T8) + u(ce, T10) =
24+7+16+31+14 = 92. Given min_util = 115, as u(ce) <

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