Incremental Association Rule Mining With a Fast Incremental Updating Frequent Pattern Growth Algorithm

One of the most challenging tasks in association rule mining is that when a new incremental database is added to an original database, some existing frequent itemsets may become infrequent itemsets and vice versa. As a result, some previous association rules may become invalid and some new association rules may emerge. We designed a new, more efficient approach for incremental association rule mining using a Fast Incremental Updating Frequent Pattern growth algorithm (FIUFP-Growth), a new Incremental Conditional Pattern tree (ICP-tree), and a compact sub-tree suitable for incremental mining of frequent itemsets. This algorithm retrieves previous frequent itemsets that have already been mined from the original database and their support counts then use them to efficiently mine frequent itemsets from the updated database and ICP-tree, reducing the number of rescans of the original database. Our algorithm reduced usages of resource and time for unnecessary sub-tree construction compared to individual FP- Growth, FUFP-tree maintenance, Pre-FUFP, and FCFPIM algorithms. From the results, at 3% minimum support threshold, the average execution time for pattern growth mining of our algorithm performs 46% faster than FP- Growth, FUFP-tree, Pre-FUFP, and FCFPIM. This approach to incremental association rule mining and our experimental findings may directly benefit designers and developers of computer business intelligence methods.