Indexed list-based high utility pattern mining with utility upper-bound reduction and pattern combination techniques

High utility pattern mining has been studied as an essential topic in the field of pattern mining in order to satisfy requirements of many real-world applications that need to process non-binary databases including item importance such as market analysis. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm with a novel indexed list-based data structure for mining high utility patterns. Previous approaches first generate an enormous number of candidate patterns on the basis of overestimation methods in their mining processes and then identify actual high utility patterns from the candidates through an additional database scan, which leads to high computational overheads. Although several list-based algorithms to discover high utility patterns without candidate generation have been suggested in recent years, they require a large number of comparison operations. Our method facilitates efficient mining of high utility patterns with the proposed indexed list by effectively reducing the total number of such operations. Moreover, we develop two techniques based on this novel data structure to more enhance mining performance of the proposed method. Experimental results on real and synthetic datasets show that the proposed algorithm mines high utility patterns more efficiently than the state-of-the-art algorithms.