An Efficient Algorithm for Mining Association Rules in Large Databases

Abstract

Mining for a.ssociation rules between items in a large database of sales transactions has been described as an important database mining problem. In this paper we present an effi-cient algorithm for mining association rules that is fundamentally different from known al-gorithms. Compared to previous algorithms, our algorithm not only reduces the I/O over-head significantly but also has lower CPU overhead for most cases. We have performed extensive experiments and compared the per-formance of our algorithm with one of the best existing algorithms. It was found that for large databases, the CPU overhead was re-duced by as much as a factor of four and I/O was reduced by almost an order of magnitude. Hence this algorithm is especially suitable for very large size databases. 1