The Closed Keys Base of Frequent Itemsets

In data mining, concise representations are useful and necessary to apprehending voluminous results of data processing. Recently many different concise representations of frequent itemsets have been investigated. In this paper, we present yet another concise representation of frequent itemsets, called the closed keys representation, with the following characteristics: (i) it allows to determine if an itemset is frequent, and if so, the support of the itemset is immediate, and (ii) basing on the closed keys representation, it is straightforward to determine all frequent key itemsets and all frequent closed itemsets. An efficient algorithm for computing the closed key representation is offered. We show that our approach has many advantages over the existing approaches, in terms of efficiency, conciseness and information inferences.