PFIN: A Parallel Frequent Itemset Mining Algorithm Using Nodesets

Frequent Itemset Mining (FIM) is one of most fundamental techniques in data mining with extensive applications to a variety of data mining problems such as association rule mining, correlations, clustering and classification. Since the first proposal of frequent itemset mining, numerous serial algorithms have been proposed in order to improve mining performance, yet most of them cannot scale to massive datasets which are very common nowadays. In this paper, we propose a new parallel FIM algorithm named PFIN based on Nodeset which is a more efficient data structure for mining frequent itemsets. PFIN can intelligently decompose a large-scale FIM problem into a set of tasks, where each task can be executed in parallel without unnecessary communication overheads. Moreover, a hash-based load balancing strategy has been adopted to optimize resource use and maximize throughput. For evaluating the performance of PFIN, we have conduct extensive experiments on Spark which is an emerging distributed in-memory processing framework to compare it against PFP which is one of state-of-the-art parallel FIM algorithms on a range of real datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed PFIN are highly competitive with PFP in scalability performance, outperforming PFP in speed performance.