estWin: Online data stream mining of recent frequent itemsets by sliding window method

Abstract

Knowledge embedded in a data stream is likely to be changed as time goes by. Identifying the recent change of the knowledge quickly can provide valuable information for the analysis of the data stream. However, most mining algorithms over a data stream are not able to extract the recent change of knowledge in a data stream adaptively. This is because the obsolete information of old data elements which may be no longer useful or possibly invalid at present is regarded as being as important as that of recent data elements. This paper proposes a sliding window method that finds recently frequent itemsets over a transactional online data stream adaptively. The size of a sliding window defines the desired life-time of information in a newly generated transaction. Consequently, only recently generated transactions in the range of the window are considered to find the recently frequent itemsets of a data stream.