• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.16 no.6
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• pp.89-95
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• 2015

Traditional frequent pattern mining discovers valid patterns with no smaller frequency than a user-defined minimum threshold from databases. In this framework, an enormous number of patterns may be extracted by a too low threshold, which makes result analysis difficult, and a too high one may generate no valid pattern. Setting an appropriate threshold is not an easy task since it requires the prior knowledge for its domain. Therefore, a pattern mining approach that is not based on the domain knowledge became needed due to inability of the framework to predict and control mining results precisely according to the given threshold. Top-k frequent pattern mining was proposed to solve the problem, and it mines top-k important patterns without any threshold setting. Through this method, users can find patterns from ones with the highest frequency to ones with the k-th highest frequency regardless of databases. In this paper, we provide knowledge both on frequent and top-k pattern mining. Although top-k frequent pattern mining extracts top-k significant patterns without the setting, it cannot consider both item quantities in transactions and relative importance of items in databases, and this is why the method cannot meet requirements of many real-world applications. That is, patterns with low frequency can be meaningful, and vice versa, in the applications. High utility pattern mining was proposed to reflect the characteristics of non-binary databases and requires a minimum threshold. Recently, top-k high utility pattern mining has been developed, through which users can mine the desired number of high utility patterns without the prior knowledge. In this paper, we analyze two algorithms related to top-k high utility pattern mining in detail. We also conduct various experiments for the algorithms on real datasets and study improvement point and development direction of top-k high utility pattern mining through performance analysis with respect to the experimental results.