Mining top-k frequent patterns over data streams sliding window

Frequent pattern mining in data streams is an important research topic in the data mining community. In previous studies, a minimum support threshold was assumed to be available for mining frequent patterns. However, setting such a threshold is typically difficult. Hence, it is more reasonable to ask users to set a bound on the result size. The present study considers mining top-k frequent patterns from data streams using a sliding window technique. A single-pass algorithm, called MSWTP, is developed for the generation of top-k frequent patterns without a threshold. In the method, the content of the transactions in the sliding window is incrementally maintained in a summary data structure, named SWTP-tree, by scanning the stream only once. To make the mining operation efficient, insignificant patterns are distinguished from others by applying the Chernoff bound. Two kinds of obsolete pattern and one kind of insignificant pattern are periodically pruned from the pattern tree. Whenever necessary, the k most frequent patterns can be selected from SWTP-tree in order of their descending frequency. The performance of the proposed technique is evaluated via simulation experiments. The results show that the proposed method is both efficient and scalable, and that it outperforms comparable algorithms.