A Multi-Core Approach to Efficiently Mining High-Utility Itemsets in Dynamic Profit Databases

Analyzing customer transactions to discover high-utility itemsets is a popular task, which consists of finding the sets of items that are purchased together and yield a high profit. However, many studies assume that transactional data is static while in real-life, it changes over time. For example, the unit profits of items may vary from one week to another because sale prices and production costs may change. Many algorithms for mining high-utility itemsets (HUI) ignore this important property and thus are inapplicable or generate inaccurate results on real data. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel algorithm named Multi-Core HUI Miner (MCH-Miner). It adapts techniques introduced in the iMEFIM algorithm to run on a parallel multi-core architecture to efficiently mine HUIs in dynamic transaction databases. An empirical evaluation shows that in most cases, MCH-Miner is significantly faster than iMEFIM, and that the cost of database scans is reduced.