As advances in technology allow for the collection, storage, and analysis of vast amounts of data, the task of screening and assessing the significance of discovered patterns is becoming a major challenge in data mining applications. In this work, we address significance in the context of frequent itemset mining. Specifically, we develop a novel methodology to identify a meaningful support threshold s* for a dataset, such that the number of itemsets with support at least s* represents a substantial deviation from what would be expected in a random dataset with the same number of transactions and the same individual item frequencies. These itemsets can then be flagged as statistically significant with a small false discovery rate. We present extensive experimental results to substantiate the effectiveness of our methodology.
A common drawback of the aforementioned works is that they assess the significance of each itemset , rather than taking into account the characteristics of the dataset from which they are extracted. As argued before, if the number of itemsets considered by the analysis is large, even in a purely random dataset some of them are likely to be flagged as significant if considered in isolation. A few works attempt at accounting for the global structure of the dataset in the context of frequent itemset mining. The authors of @cite_10 propose an approach based on Markov chains to generate a random dataset that has identical transaction lengths and identical frequencies of the individual items as the given real dataset. The work suggests comparing the outcomes of a number of data mining tasks, frequent itemset mining among the others, in the real and the randomly generated datasets in order to assess whether the real datasets embody any significant global structure. However, such an assessment is carried out in a purely qualitative fashion without rigorous statistical grounding.
@cite_10
1978036582 2163917503 2062786477 2126106168
The problem of assessing the significance of data mining results on high-dimensional 0--1 datasets has been studied extensively in the literature. For problems such as mining frequent sets and finding correlations, significance testing can be done by standard statistical tests such as chi-square, or other methods. However, the results of such tests depend only on the specific attributes and not on the dataset as a whole. Moreover, the tests are difficult to apply to sets of patterns or other complex results of data mining algorithms. In this article, we consider a simple randomization technique that deals with this shortcoming. The approach consists of producing random datasets that have the same row and column margins as the given dataset, computing the results of interest on the randomized instances and comparing them to the results on the actual data. This randomization technique can be used to assess the results of many different types of data mining algorithms, such as frequent sets, clustering, and spectral analysis. To generate random datasets with given margins, we use variations of a Markov chain approach which is based on a simple swap operation. We give theoretical results on the efficiency of different randomization methods, and apply the swap randomization method to several well-known datasets. Our results indicate that for some datasets the structure discovered by the data mining algorithms is expected, given the row and column margins of the datasets, while for other datasets the discovered structure conveys information that is not captured by the margin counts. The problem of assessing the significance of data mining results on high-dimensional 0-1 data sets has been studied extensively in the literature. For problems such as mining frequent sets and finding correlations, significance testing can be done by, e.g., chi-square tests, or many other methods. However, the results of such tests depend only on the specific attributes and not on the dataset as a whole. Moreover, the tests are more difficult to apply to sets of patterns or other complex results of data mining. In this paper, we consider a simple randomization technique that deals with this shortcoming. The approach consists of producing random datasets that have the same row and column margins with the given dataset, computing the results of interest on the randomized instances, and comparing them against the results on the actual data. This randomization technique can be used to assess the results of many different types of data mining algorithms, such as frequent sets, clustering, and rankings. To generate random datasets with given margins, we use variations of a Markov chain approach, which is based on a simple swap operation. We give theoretical results on the efficiency of different randomization methods, and apply the swap randomization method to several well-known datasets. Our results indicate that for some datasets the structure discovered by the data mining algorithms is a random artifact, while for other datasets the discovered structure conveys meaningful information. Statistical assessment of the results of data mining is increasingly recognised as a core task in the knowledge discovery process. It is of key importance in practice, as results that might seem interesting at first glance can often be explained by well-known basic properties of the data. In pattern mining, for instance, such trivial results can be so overwhelming in number that filtering them out is a necessity in order to identify the truly interesting patterns. In this paper, we propose an approach for assessing results on real-valued rectangular databases. More specifically, using our analytical model we are able to statistically assess whether or not a discovered structure may be the trivial result of the row and column marginal distributions in the database. Our main approach is to use the Maximum Entropy principle to fit a background model to the data while respecting its marginal distributions. To find these distributions, we employ an MDL based histogram estimator, and we fit these in our model using efficient convex optimization techniques. Subsequently, our model can be used to calculate probabilities directly, as well as to efficiently sample data with the purpose of assessing results by means of empirical hypothesis testing. Notably, our approach is efficient, parameter-free, and naturally deals with missing values. As such, it represents a well-founded alternative to swap randomisation Mining frequent patterns from a hidden dataset is an important task with 43 various real-life applications. In this research, we propose a solution to this problem that is based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling of frequent patterns. Instead of returning all the frequent patterns, the proposed paradigm returns a small set of randomly selected patterns so that the clandestinity of the dataset can be maintained. Our solution also allows interactive sampling, so that the sampled patterns can fulfill the user's requirement effectively. We show experimental results from several real life datasets to validate the capability and usefulness of our solution; in particular, we show examples that by using our proposed solution, an eCommerce marketplace can allow pattern mining on user session data without disclosing the data to the public; such a mining paradigm helps the sellers of the marketplace, which eventually boost the marketplace's own revenue.