Design and Analysis of a Reconfigurable Platform for Frequent Pattern Mining

Frequent pattern mining algorithms are designed to find commonly occurring sets in databases. This class of algorithms is typically very memory intensive, leading to prohibitive runtimes on large databases. A class of reconfigurable architectures has been recently developed that have shown promise in accelerating some data mining applications. In this paper, we propose a new architecture for frequent pattern mining based on a systolic tree structure. The goal of this architecture is to mimic the internal memory layout of the original pattern mining software algorithm while achieving a higher throughput. We provide a detailed analysis of the area and performance requirements of our systolic tree-based architecture, and show that our reconfigurable platform is faster than the original software algorithm for mining long frequent patterns.