Association Rule Mining
also outperforms the discussed existing structures in
terms of efficiency, effectiveness, and practicality.
Our structure is termed Support-Ordered Trie Itemset
(SOTrieIT — pronounced “so-try-it”). It is a dual-level
support-ordered trie data structure used to store perti-
nent itemset information to speed up the discovery of
frequent itemsets.
As its construction is carried out before actual min-
ing, it can be viewed as a preprocessing step. For every
transaction that arrives, 1-itemsets and 2-itemsets are
first extracted from it. For each itemset, the SOTrieIT
will be traversed in order to locate the node that stores
its support count. Support counts of 1-itemsets and 2-
itemsets are stored in first-level and second-level nodes,
respectively. The traversal of the SOTrieIT thus requires
at most two redirections, which makes it very fast. At
any point in time, the SOTrieIT contains the support
counts of all 1-itemsets and 2-itemsets that appear in
all the transactions. It will then be sorted level-wise
from left to right according to the support counts of
the nodes in descending order.
Figure 3 shows a SOTrieIT constructed from the
database in Table 1. The bracketed number beside an
item is its support count. Hence, the support count of
itemset {AB} is 2. Notice that the nodes are ordered by
support counts in a level-wise descending order.
In algorithms such as FP-growth that use a similar
data structure to store itemset information, the struc-
ture must be rebuilt to accommodate updates to the
universal itemset. The SOTrieIT can be easily updated
to accommodate the new changes. If a node for a new
item in the universal itemset does not exist, it will be
created and inserted into the SOTrieIT accordingly.
If an item is removed from the universal itemset, all
Figure 3. A SOTrieIT structure
ROOT
C(4) A(3)
D(1) C(3) B(2) D(1)
nodes containing that item need only be removed, and
the rest of the nodes would still be valid. A
Unlike the trie structure of Amir et al. (1999), the
SOTrieIT is ordered by support count (which speeds
up mining) and does not require the powersets of trans-
actions (which reduces construction time). The main
weakness of the SOTrieIT is that it can only discover
frequent 1-itemsets and 2-itemsets; its main strength
is its speed in discovering them. They can be found
promptly because there is no need to scan the database.
In addition, the search (depth first) can be stopped at
a particular level the moment a node representing a
nonfrequent itemset is found, because the nodes are
all support ordered.
Another advantage of the SOTrieIT, compared
with all previously discussed structures, is that it can
be constructed online, meaning that each time a new
transaction arrives, the SOTrieIT can be incrementally
updated. This feature is possible because the SOTrieIT
is constructed without the need to know the support
threshold; it is support independent. All 1-itemsets
and 2-itemsets in the database are used to update the
SOTrieIT regardless of their support counts. To con-
serve storage space, existing trie structures such as
the FP-tree have to use thresholds to keep their sizes
manageable; thus, when new transactions arrive, they
have to be reconstructed, because the support counts
of itemsets will have changed.
Finally, the SOTrieIT requires far less storage
space than a trie or Patricia trie because it is only two
levels deep and can be easily stored in both memory
and files. Although this causes some input/output (I/O)
overheads, it is insignificant as shown in our extensive
experiments. We have designed several algorithms to
B(3) D(1)
C(3) D(1)