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New algorithms for finding approximate frequent item sets

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Abstract

In standard frequent item set mining a transaction supports an item set only if all items in the set are present. However, in many cases this is too strict a requirement that can render it impossible to find certain relevant groups of items. By relaxing the support definition, allowing for some items of a given set to be missing from a transaction, this drawback can be amended. The resulting item sets have been called approximate, fault-tolerant or fuzzy item sets. In this paper we present two new algorithms to find such item sets: the first is an extension of item set mining based on cover similarities and computes and evaluates the subset size occurrence distribution with a scheme that is related to the Eclat algorithm. The second employs a clustering-like approach, in which the distances are derived from the item covers with distance measures for sets or binary vectors and which is initialized with a one-dimensional Sammon projection of the distance matrix. We demonstrate the benefits of our algorithms by applying them to a concept detection task on the 2008/2009 Wikipedia Selection for schools and to the neurobiological task of detecting neuron ensembles in (simulated) parallel spike trains.

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Notes

  1. http://www.borgelt.net/sodim.html.

  2. http://www.borgelt.net/genpst.html.

  3. The only case in which groups can be complete is when the co-occurrences of two groups overlap accidentally and this fills (one of) the formerly created gaps. However, this is highly unlikely and we did not observe this case in our experiments.

  4. The script used to perform these experiments can be found in the source package of our SODIM implementation at http://www.borgelt.net/sodim.html.

  5. http://schools-wikipedia.org/.

  6. http://en.wikipedia.org/.

  7. http://schools-wikipedia.org/wp/l/List_of_elements_by_name.htm.

  8. http://www.borgelt.net/genpst.html.

  9. Note that, since we are considering only pairwise comparisons here, we are less restricted than in Segond and Borgelt (2011), where measures referring to n 01 and n 10 other than through the sum of these quantities are not applicable.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Program FP7-ICT-2007-C FET-Open, contract no. BISON-211898, and by the Helmholtz Alliance on Systems Biology.

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Correspondence to Christian Borgelt.

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Borgelt, C., Braune, C., Kötter, T. et al. New algorithms for finding approximate frequent item sets. Soft Comput 16, 903–917 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-011-0776-2

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