Efficient Top-K Identical Frequent Itemsets Mining without Support Threshold Parameter from Transactional Datasets Produced by IoT-Based Smart Shopping Carts

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT)-backed smart shopping carts are generating an extensive amount of data in shopping markets around the world. This data can be cleaned and utilized for setting business goals and strategies. Artificial intelligence (AI) methods are used to efficiently extract meaningful patterns or insights from such huge amounts of data or big data. One such technique is Association Rule Mining (ARM) which is used to extract strategic information from the data. The crucial step in ARM is Frequent Itemsets Mining (FIM) followed by association rule generation. The FIM process starts by tuning the support threshold parameter from the user to produce the number of required frequent patterns. To perform the FIM process, the user applies hit and trial methods to rerun the aforesaid routine in order to receive the required number of patterns. The research community has shifted its focus towards the development of top-K most frequent patterns not using the support threshold parameter tuned by the user. Top-K most frequent patterns mining is considered a harder task than user-tuned support-threshold-based FIM. One of the reasons why top-K most frequent patterns mining techniques are computationally intensive is the fact that they produce a large number of candidate itemsets. These methods also do not use any explicit pruning mechanism apart from the internally auto-maintained support threshold parameter. Therefore, we propose an efficient TKIFIs Miner algorithm that uses depth-first search strategy for top-K identical frequent patterns mining. The TKIFIs Miner uses specialized one- and two-itemsets-based pruning techniques for topmost patterns mining. Comparative analysis is performed on special benchmark datasets, for example, Retail with 16,469 items, T40I10D100K and T10I4D100K with 1000 items each, etc. The evaluation results have proven that the TKIFIs Miner is at the top of the line, compared to recently available topmost patterns mining methods not using the support threshold parameter.