New GPU-based swarm intelligence approach for reducing big association rules space

This paper deals with exploration and mining of association rules in big data, with the big challenge of increasing computation time. We propose a new approach based on metarules discovery that gives to the user the summary of the rules' space through a meta-rules representation. This allows the user to decide about the rules to take and prune. We also adapt a pruning strategy of our previous work to keep only the representatives rules. As the meta-rules space is much larger than the rules space, two approaches are proposed for efficient exploitation. The first one uses a bees swarm optimization method in the meta-rules discovery process, which is extended using GPU-based parallel programming to form the second one. The sequential version has been first tested using medium rules set, and the results show clear improvement in terms of the number of returned meta-rules. The two versions have then been compared on large scale rules sets, and the results illustrate the acceleration on the summarization process by the parallel approach without reducing the quality of resulted meta-rules. Further experiments on Webdocs big data instances reveal that the proposed method of pruning rules by summarizing metarules considerably reduces the association rules space compared to state-of-the-art association rules mining-based approaches.