FARM: A framework for exploring mining spaces with multiple attributes

Abstract

Mining for frequent itemsets typically involves a preprocessing step in which data with multiple attributes are grouped into transactions, and items are defined based on attribute values. We have observed that suck fixed attribute mining can severely constrain the patterns that are discovered. Herein, we introduce mining spaces, a new framework for mining multi-attribute data that includes the discovery of transaction and item definitions (with the exploitation of taxonomies and functional dependencies if they are available). We prove that special downward closure properties (or anti-monotonic property) hold for mining spaces, a result that allows us to construct efficient algorithms for mining patterns without the constraints of fixed attribute mining. We apply our algorithms to real world data collected from a production computer network. The results show that by exploiting the special kinds of downward closure in mining spaces, execution times for mining can be reduced by a factor of three to four. © 2001 IEEE.