Mining high average utility itemsets using artificial fish swarm algorithm with computed multiple minimum average utility thresholds

Abstract

It is obvious that the problem of Frequent Itemset Mining (FIM) is very popular in data mining, which generates frequent itemsets from a transaction database. An extension of the frequent itemset mining is High Utility Itemset Mining (HUIM) which identifies itemsets with high utility from the transaction database. This gains popularity in data mining, because it identifies itemsets which have more value but the same was not identified as frequent by Frequent Itemset Mining. HUIM is generally referred to as Utility Mining. The utility of the items is measured based on parameters like cost, profit, quantity or any other measures preferred by the users. Compared to high utility itemsets (HUIs) mining, high average utility itemsets (HAUIs) mining is more precise by considering the number of items in the itemsets. In state-of-the-art algorithms that mines HUIS and HAUIs use a single fixed minimum utility threshold based on which HAUIs are identified. In this paper, the proposed algorithm mines HAUIs from transaction databases using Artificial Fish Swarm Algorithm (AFSA) with computed multiple minimum average utility thresholds. Computing the minimum average utility threshold for each item with the AFSA algorithm outperforms other state-of-the-art HAUI mining algorithms with multiple minimum utility thresholds and user-defined single minimum threshold in terms of number of HAUIs. It is observed that the proposed algorithm outperforms well in terms of execution time, number of candidates generated and memory consumption when compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms.