AEfficient Discovery of Association Rules and Frequent Itemsets through Sampling with Tight Performance Guarantees1

The tasks of extracting (top-K) Frequent Itemsets (FI’s) and Association Rules (AR’s) are fundamental primitives in data mining and database applications. Exact algorithms for these problems exist and are widely used, but their running time is hindered by the need of scanning the entire dataset, possibly mul-tiple times. High quality approximations of FI’s and AR’s are sufficient for most practical uses. Sampling techniques can be used for fast discovery of approximate solutions, but works exploring this technique did not provide satisfactory performance guarantees on the quality of the approximation, due to the difficulty of bounding the probability of under- or over-sampling any one of an unknown number of frequent itemsets. We circumvent this issue by applying the statistical concept of Vapnik-Chervonenkis (VC) dimension to develop a novel technique for providing tight bounds on the sample size that guarantees approximation of the (top-K) FI’s and AR’s within user-specified parameters. The resulting sample size is linearly dependent on the VC-dimension of a range space associated with the dataset. We analyze the VC-dimension of this range space and show that it is upper bounded by an easy-to-compute characteristic quantity of the dataset, the d-index, namely the maximum integer d such that the dataset contains at least d transactions of length at least d such that no one of them is a superset of or equal to another. We show that this bound is tight for a large class of datasets. The resulting sample size is a significant improvement over previous known results