Efficient mining of frequent patterns using ascending frequency ordered prefix-tree

Mining frequent patterns, including mining frequent closed patterns or maximal patterns, is a fundamental and important problem in data mining area. Many algorithms adopt the pattern growth approach, which is shown to be superior to the candidate generate-and-test approach, especially when long patterns exist in the datasets. In this paper, we identify the key factors that influence the performance of the pattern growth approach, and optimize them to further improve the performance. Our algorithm uses a simple while compact data structure-ascending frequency ordered prefix-tree (AFOPT) to store the conditional databases, in which we use arrays to store single branches to further save space. The AFOPT structure is traversed in top-down depth-first order. Our analysis and experiment results show that the combination of the top-down traversal strategy and the ascending frequency order achieves significant performance improvement over previous works