Apriori-BM Algorithm for Mining Association Rules Based on Bit Set Matrix

Finding association rules is one of the most popular problems in the field of data mining. Apriori is a well-known algorithm for association rule mining. It uses candidate generation and test method to find the bitmap that satisfy the minimum support threshold, but the process repeatedly scans the database and produces the plenty of candidates. A new optimization algorithm based on bit set Matrix was proposed. It just need scan the database twice to generate the bit set matrix structure needed for the algorithm. During the mining process, the infrequent itemsets were deleted in time to reduce the scanning range of the algorithm, and bit operation was used to speed up the subset detection. Experimental results show that the algorithm runs faster than Apriori algorithm.