Index support for frequent itemset mining in a relational DBMS

Many efforts have been devoted to couple data mining activities with relational DBMSs, but a true integration into the relational DBMS kernel has been rarely achieved. This paper presents a novel indexing technique, which represents transactions in a succinct form, appropriate for tightly integrating frequent itemset mining in a relational DBMS. The data representation is complete, i.e., no support threshold is enforced, in order to allow reusing the index for mining itemsets with any support threshold. Furthermore, an appropriate structure of the stored information has been devised, in order to allow a selective access of the index blocks necessary for the current extraction phase. The index has been implemented into the PostgreSQL open source DBMS and exploits its physical level access methods. Experiments have been run for various datasets, characterized by different data distributions. The execution time of the frequent itemset extraction task exploiting the index is always comparable with and sometime faster than a C++ implementation of the FP-growth algorithm accessing data stored on a flat file.