Multi-level dataset decomposition for parallel frequent itemset mining on a cluster of personal computers

Frequent Itemset mining is time consuming for large datasets. Many parallel frequent itemset mining algorithms have been proposed to speed up the mining process. This paper presents a parallel frequent itemset mining algorithm on a cluster of personal computers. To facilitate parallel frequent itemset mining, we use prefix path based method to decompose a transactional dataset into its frequent 1-itemset sub-datasets. We called the parallel frequent itemset mining algorithm based on the frequent 1-itemset sub-dataset decomposition the single-level parallel frequent itemset mining algorithm (SLPFIM) in our PC cluster platform. To mitigate the bottleneck caused by time-consuming 1-itemset sub-datasets, we propose a multi-level parallel frequent itemset mining (MLPFIM) algorithm to further decompose the time-consuming 1-itemset sub-datasets into their corresponding sub-sub-datasets. The fine granule of the sub-sub-datasets enhances the load balancing in parallel frequent itemset mining. The experimental results showed that the SLPFIM offered a maximum of 11.9x speedup over the non-parallel execution of the FP-Growth algorithm while the MLPFIM achieved a maximum of 23.1x speedup over the non-parallel execution of the FP-Growth algorithm. The experimental results also showed that the MLPFIM offered a maximum of 2.14x speedup over the SLPFIM.