Efficient mining of frequent itemsets in social network data based on MapReduce framework

Social Networks promote information sharing between people everywhere and at all times. Mining data produced in this data-rich environment can be extremely useful. Frequent itemset mining plays an important role in mining associations, correlations, sequential patterns, causality, episodes, multidimensional patterns, max-patterns, partial periodicity, emerging patterns, and many other significant data mining tasks in social networks. With the exponential growth of social network data towards a terabyte or more, most of the traditional frequent itemset mining algorithms become ineffective due to either huge resource requirements or large communications overhead. Cloud computing has proved that processing very large datasets over commodity clusters can be done by providing the right programming model. As a parallel programming model, MapReduce, one of most important techniques for cloud computing, has emerged in the mining of datasets of terabyte scale or larger on clusters of computers. In this paper, we propose an efficient frequent itemset mining algorithm, called IMRApriori, based on MapReduce framework which deals with Hadoop cloud, a parallel store and computing platform. The paper demonstrates experimental results to corroborate the theoretical claims.