On finding similar items in a stream of transactions

Andrea Campagna, Rasmus Pagh

Research output: Conference Article in Proceeding or Book/Report chapterArticle in proceedingsResearchpeer-review

Abstract

While there has been a lot of work on finding frequent itemsets in transaction data streams, none of these solve the problem of finding similar pairs according to standard similarity measures.
This paper is a first attempt at dealing with this, arguably more important, problem.

We start out with a negative result that also explains the lack of theoretical upper bounds on the space usage of data mining algorithms for finding frequent itemsets:
Any algorithm that (even only approximately and with a chance of error) finds the most frequent $k$-itemset must use space $\Omega(\min\{mb,n^k,(mb/\varphi)^k\})$ bits, where $mb$ is the number of items in the stream so far, $n$ is the number of distinct items and $\varphi$ is a support threshold.

To achieve any non-trivial space upper bound we must thus abandon a worst-case assumption on the data stream.
We work under the model that the transactions come in random order, and show that surprisingly, not only is small-space similarity mining possible for the most common similarity measures, but the mining accuracy {\em improves\/} with the length of the stream for any fixed support threshold.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationKDCloud 2010 : Proceedings of the International Workshop on Knowledge Discovery Using Cloud and Distributed Computing Platforms
Number of pages8
PublisherIEEE Computer Society Press
Publication date14 Dec 2010
Publication statusPublished - 14 Dec 2010
EventIEEE International Conference on Data Mining -
Duration: 2 Jul 2010 → …
Conference number: 9

Conference

ConferenceIEEE International Conference on Data Mining
Number9
Period02/07/2010 → …

Keywords

  • frequent itemsets
  • transaction data streams
  • similarity measures
  • space complexity
  • random order transactions

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