BIGMiner: a fast and scalable distributed frequent pattern miner for big data

Frequent itemset mining is widely used as a fundamental data mining technique. Recently, there have been proposed a number of MapReduce-based frequent itemset mining methods in order to overcome the limits on data size and speed of mining that sequential mining methods have. However, the existing MapReduce-based methods still do not have a good scalability due to high workload skewness, large intermediate data, and large network communication overhead. In this paper, we propose BIGMiner, a fast and scalable MapReduce-based frequent itemset mining method. BIGMiner generates equal-sized sub-databases called transaction chunks and performs support counting only based on transaction chunks and bitwise operations without generating and shuffling intermediate data. As a result, BIGMiner achieves very high scalability due to no workload skewness, no intermediate data, and small network communication overhead. Through extensive experiments using large-scale datasets of up to 6.5 billion transactions, we have shown that BIGMiner consistently and significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods without any memory problems.