Adaptive-Miner: an efficient distributed association rule mining algorithm on Spark

Extraction of valuable data from extensive datasets is a standout amongst the most vital exploration issues. Association rule mining is one of the highly used methods for this purpose. Finding possible associations between items in large transaction based datasets (finding frequent itemsets) is most crucial part of the association rule mining task. Many single-machine based association rule mining algorithms exist but the massive amount of data available these days is above the capacity of a single machine based algorithm. Therefore, to meet the demands of this ever-growing enormous data, there is a need for distributed association rule mining algorithm which can run on multiple machines. For these types of parallel/distributed applications, MapReduce is one of the best fault-tolerant frameworks. Hadoop is one of the most popular open-source software frameworks with MapReduce based approach for distributed storage and processing of large datasets using standalone clusters built from commodity hardware. But heavy disk I/O operation at each iteration of a highly iterative algorithm like Apriori makes Hadoop inefficient. A number of MapReduce based platforms are being developed for parallel computing in recent years. Among them, a platform, namely, Spark have attracted a lot of attention because of its inbuilt support to distributed computations. Therefore, we implemented a distributed association rule mining algorithm on Spark named as Adaptive-Miner which uses adaptive approach for finding frequent patterns with higher accuracy and efficiency. Adaptive-Miner uses an adaptive strategy based on the partial processing of datasets. Adaptive-Miner makes execution plans before every iteration and goes with the best suitable plan to minimize time and space complexity. Adpative-Miner is a dynamic association rule mining algorithm which change its approach based on the nature of dataset. Therefore, it is different and better than state-of-the-art static association rule mining algorithms. We conduct in-depth experiments to gain insight into the effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability of the Adaptive-Miner algorithm on Spark. Available: https://github.com/sanjaysinghrathi/Adaptive-Miner