A Distributed Method for Fast Mining Frequent Patterns From Big Data

In recent years, knowledge discovery in databases provides a powerful capability to discover meaningful and useful information. For numerous real-life applications, frequent pattern mining and association rule mining have been extensively studied. In traditional mining algorithms, data are centralized and memory-resident. As a result of the large amount of data, bandwidth limitation, and energy limitations when applying these methods to distributed databases, especially in this era of big data, the performance is not effective enough. Hence, data mining on distributed environments has emerged as an important research area. To improve the performance, we propose a set of algorithms based on FP growth that discover FPs that are capable of providing fast and scalable service in distributed computing environments and a brief data structure to store items and counts to minimize the data for transmission on the network. To ensure completeness and execution capability, DistEclat and BigFIM were considered for the experiment comparison. Experiments show that the proposed method has superior cost-effectiveness for processing massive datasets and good capabilities under various experiment conditions. The proposed method on average required only 33% of the execution time and 45% of the transmission cost of DistEclat. Compared to BigFIM, The proposed method on average required 23.3% of the execution time and 14.2% of the transmission cost of BigFIM.