Mining Top-k Regular High-Utility Itemsets in Transactional Databases

Mining high-utility itemsets is an important task in the area of data mining. It involves exponential mining space and returns a very large number of high-utility itemsets. In a real-time scenario, it is often sufficient to mine a small number of high-utility itemsets based on user-specified interestingness. Recently, the temporal regularity of an itemset is considered as an important interesting criterion for many applications. Methods for finding the regular high utility itemsets suffers from setting the threshold value. To address this problem, a novel algorithm called as TKRHU (Top k Regular High Utility Itemset) Miner is proposed to mine top-k high utility itemsets that appears regularly where k represents the desired number of regular high itemsets. A novel list structure RUL and efficient pruning techniques are developed to discover the top-k regular itemsets with high profit. Efficient pruning techniques are designed for reducing search space. Experimental results show that proposed algorithm using novel list structure achieves high efficiency in terms of runtime and space.