Mining Frequent Patterns

without Candidate Generation

Jiawei Han, Jian Pei and Yiwen Yin
School of Computer Science
Simon Fraser University

Presented by Song Wang. March 18th, 2009 Data Mining Class

Slides Modified From Mohammed and Zhenyu’s Version
Outline of the Presentation

Outline
• Frequent Pattern Mining: Problem statement and an
example
• Review of Apriori-like Approaches
• FP-Growth:
– Overview
– FP-tree:
• structure, construction and advantages
– FP-growth:
• FP-tree conditional pattern bases  conditional FP-tree
frequent patterns
• Experiments
• Discussion:
– Improvement of FP-growth
• Conclusion Remarks

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Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
Frequent Pattern Mining Problem: Review

Frequent Pattern Mining: An Example

Given a transaction database DB and a minimum support threshold ξ, find
all frequent patterns (item sets) with support no less than ξ.

Input: DB: TID Items bought

100 {f, a, c, d, g, i, m, p}
200 {a, b, c, f, l, m, o}
300 {b, f, h, j, o}
400 {b, c, k, s, p}
500 {a, f, c, e, l, p, m, n}

Minimum support: ξ =3

Output: all frequent patterns, i.e., f, a, …, fa, fac, fam, fm,am…

Problem Statement: How to efficiently find all frequent patterns?

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Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
Review of Apriori-like Approaches for finding complete frequent item-sets

Apriori
Candidate
• Main Steps of Apriori Algorithm: Generation

– Use frequent (k – 1)-itemsets (Lk-1) to generate candidates of

frequent k-itemsets Ck
– Scan database and count each pattern in Ck , get frequent k-itemsets
( Lk ) .
Candidate
• E.g. , Test
TID Items bought Apriori iteration
100 {f, a, c, d, g, i, m, p} C1 f,a,c,d,g,i,m,p,l,o,h,j,k,s,b,e,n
200 {a, b, c, f, l, m, o} L1 f, a, c, m, b, p

300 {b, f, h, j, o} C2 fa, fc, fm, fp, ac, am, …bp

400 {b, c, k, s, p} L2 fa, fc, fm, …
500 {a, f, c, e, l, p, m, n} …

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Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation. SIGMOD2000
Disadvantages of Apriori-like Approach

Performance Bottlenecks of Apriori

• Bottlenecks of Apriori: candidate generation

– Generate huge candidate sets:
• 104 frequent 1-itemset will generate 107 candidate 2-
itemsets
• To discover a frequent pattern of size 100, e.g., {a1, a2,
…, a100}, one needs to generate 2100  1030 candidates.
– Candidate Test incur multiple scans of database:
each candidate

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Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
Overview: FP-tree based method

Overview of FP-Growth: Ideas

• Compress a large database into a compact, Frequent-Pattern
tree (FP-tree) structure
– highly compacted, but complete for frequent pattern mining
– avoid costly repeated database scans
• Develop an efficient, FP-tree-based frequent pattern mining
method (FP-growth)
– A divide-and-conquer methodology: decompose mining tasks into
smaller ones
– Avoid candidate generation: sub-database test only.

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Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000))
FP-Tree

FP-tree:
Construction and Design

Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)

FP-tree

Construct FP-tree
Two Steps:
1. Scan the transaction DB for the first time, find frequent
items (single item patterns) and order them into a list L in
frequency descending order.
e.g., L={f:4, c:4, a:3, b:3, m:3, p:3}
In the format of (item-name, support)
2. For each transaction, order its frequent items according to
the order in L; Scan DB the second time, construct FP-tree
by putting each frequency ordered transaction onto it.

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Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
FP-tree

FP-tree Example: step 1

Step 1: Scan DB for the first time to generate L

L

TID Items bought Item frequency

100 {f, a, c, d, g, i, m, p} f 4
200 {a, b, c, f, l, m, o} c 4
300 {b, f, h, j, o} a 3
400 {b, c, k, s, p} b 3
500 {a, f, c, e, l, p, m, n} m 3
p 3

By-Product of First Scan

of Database
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Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
FP-tree

FP-tree Example: step 2

Step 2: scan the DB for the second time, order frequent items
in each transaction

TID Items bought (ordered) frequent items

100 {f, a, c, d, g, i, m, p} {f, c, a, m, p}
200 {a, b, c, f, l, m, o} {f, c, a, b, m}
300 {b, f, h, j, o} {f, b}
400 {b, c, k, s, p} {c, b, p}
500 {a, f, c, e, l, p, m, n} {f, c, a, m, p}

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Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
FP-tree

FP-tree Example: step 2

Step 2: construct FP-tree

{} {}

f:1 f:2
{f, c, a, m, p} {f, c, a, b, m}
{} c:1 c:2

a:1 a:2

m:1 m:1 b:1

NOTE: Each transaction
corresponds to one path
in the FP-tree p:1 p:1 m:1

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Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
FP-tree

FP-tree Example: step 2

Step 2: construct FP-tree

{} {} {}

f:3 f:3 c:1 f:4 c:1

{f, b} {c, b, p} {f, c, a, m, p}
c:2 b:1 c:2 b:1 b:1 c:3 b:1 b:1

a:2 a:2 p:1 a:3 p:1

m:1 b:1 m:1 b:1 m:2 b:1

p:1 m:1 p:1 m:1 p:2 m:1

Node-Link

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Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
FP-tree

Construction Example
Final FP-tree

{}
Header Table
f:4 c:1
Item head
f
c c:3 b:1 b:1
a
b a:3 p:1
m
p m:2 b:1

p:2 m:1

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Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
FP-tree

FP-Tree Definition
• FP-tree is a frequent pattern tree . Formally, FP-tree is a tree structure
defined below:
1. One root labeled as “null", a set of item prefix sub-trees as the
children of the root, and a frequent-item header table.
2. Each node in the item prefix sub-trees has three fields:
– item-name : register which item this node represents,
– count, the number of transactions represented by the portion of the path
reaching this node,
– node-link that links to the next node in the FP-tree carrying the same
item-name, or null if there is none.
3. Each entry in the frequent-item header table has two fields,
– item-name, and
– head of node-link that points to the first node in the FP-tree carrying the
item-name.

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Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
FP-tree

Advantages of the FP-tree Structure

• The most significant advantage of the FP-tree

– Scan the DB only twice and twice only.

• Completeness:
– the FP-tree contains all the information related to mining frequent
patterns (given the min-support threshold). Why?

• Compactness:
– The size of the tree is bounded by the occurrences of frequent items
– The height of the tree is bounded by the maximum number of items in a
transaction

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Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
FP-tree

Questions?
• Why descending order?
• Example 1: {}

f:1 a:1

TID (unordered) frequent items

100 {f, a, c, m, p} a:1 f:1
500 {a, f, c, p, m}
c:1 c:1

m:1 p:1

p:1 m:1

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Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
FP-tree

Questions?
• Example 2: {}
TID (ascended) frequent items
100 {p, m, a, c, f} p:3 m:2 c:1
200 {m, b, a, c, f}
300 {b, f} m:2 b:1 b:1 b:1
400 {p, b, c}
500 {p, m, a, c, f} a:2 p:1
c:1 a:2

This tree is larger than FP-tree,

c:2 c:1
because in FP-tree, more frequent
items have a higher position, which
makes branches less f:2 f:2

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Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
FP-Growth

FP-growth:
Mining Frequent Patterns
Using FP-tree

Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)

FP-Growth

Mining Frequent Patterns Using FP-tree

• General idea (divide-and-conquer)
Recursively grow frequent patterns using the FP-tree: looking
for shorter ones recursively and then concatenating the suffix:
– For each frequent item, construct its conditional pattern
base, and then its conditional FP-tree;
– Repeat the process on each newly created conditional FP-
tree until the resulting FP-tree is empty, or it contains only
one path (single path will generate all the combinations of
its sub-paths, each of which is a frequent pattern)

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Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
FP-Growth

3 Major Steps

Starting the processing from the end of list L:

Step 1:
Construct conditional pattern base for each item in the header table
Step 2
Construct conditional FP-tree from each conditional pattern base
Step 3
Recursively mine conditional FP-trees and grow frequent patterns
obtained so far. If the conditional FP-tree contains a single path, simply
enumerate all the patterns

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Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
FP-Growth: An Example

Step 1: Construct Conditional Pattern Base

• Starting at the bottom of frequent-item header table in the FP-tree

• Traverse the FP-tree by following the link of each frequent item
• Accumulate all of transformed prefix paths of that item to form a
conditional pattern base
{} Conditional pattern bases
Header Table
item cond. pattern base
f:4 c:1
Item head p fcam:2, cb:1
f m fca:2, fcab:1
c c:3 b:1 b:1
a b fca:1, f:1, c:1
b a:3 p:1
a fc:3
m
p m:2 b:1 c f:3
f {}
p:2 m:1
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Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
FP-Growth

Properties of FP-Tree

• Node-link property
– For any frequent item ai, all the possible frequent patterns that contain
ai can be obtained by following ai's node-links, starting from ai's head
in the FP-tree header.
• Prefix path property
– To calculate the frequent patterns for a node ai in a path P, only the
prefix sub-path of ai in P need to be accumulated, and its frequency
count should carry the same count as node ai.

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Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
FP-Growth: An Example

Step 2: Construct Conditional FP-tree

• For each pattern base

– Accumulate the count for each item in the base
– Construct the conditional FP-tree for the frequent items of the
pattern base
{}
Header Table
Item head f:4 {}
f 4
c 4 c:3 f:3
m- cond. pattern base:
a 3 fca:2, fcab:1
a:3  
b 3 c:3
m 3 m:2 b:1
p 3 a:3
m:1 m-conditional FP-tree

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Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
FP-Growth
Step 3: Recursively mine the conditional FP-
tree
conditional FP-tree of conditional FP-tree of conditional FP-tree of
“m”: (fca:3) “am”: (fc:3) add “cam”: (f:3)
{} “c” {}
{} add Frequent Pattern Frequent Pattern
Frequent Pattern “a” f:3 f:3
f:3 add c:3 add add
“c” “f” “f”
c:3
conditional FP-tree of conditional FP-tree of
a:3 “cm”: (f:3) of “fam”: 3
add
{} “f”
Frequent Pattern
Frequent Pattern
add conditional FP-tree of
f:3 “fcm”: 3
“f”

Frequent Pattern Frequent Pattern

fcam

conditional FP-tree of “fm”: 3

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Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation
Frequent Pattern (SIGMOD2000)
FP-Growth

Principles of FP-Growth

• Pattern growth property

– Let  be a frequent itemset in DB, B be 's conditional pattern base,
and  be an itemset in B. Then    is a frequent itemset in DB iff
 is frequent in B.
• Is “fcabm ” a frequent pattern?
– “fcab” is a branch of m's conditional pattern base
– “b” is NOT frequent in transactions containing “fcab ”
– “bm” is NOT a frequent itemset.

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Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
FP-Growth
Conditional Pattern Bases and
Conditional FP-Tree

Item Conditional pattern base Conditional FP-tree

p {(fcam:2), (cb:1)} {(c:3)}|p
m {(fca:2), (fcab:1)} {(f:3, c:3, a:3)}|m
b {(fca:1), (f:1), (c:1)} Empty
a {(fc:3)} {(f:3, c:3)}|a
c {(f:3)} {(f:3)}|c
f Empty Empty
order of L
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Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
FP-Growth

Single FP-tree Path Generation

• Suppose an FP-tree T has a single path P. The complete set of frequent

pattern of T can be generated by enumeration of all the combinations of
the sub-paths of P
{}
All frequent patterns concerning m:
combination of {f, c, a} and m
f:3
m,
c:3  fm, cm, am,
fcm, fam, cam,
a:3
fcam
m-conditional FP-tree

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Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
 Summary of FP-Growth Algorithm
• Mining frequent patterns can be viewed as first mining
1-itemset and progressively growing each 1-itemset by
mining on its conditional pattern base recursively

• Transform a frequent k-itemset mining problem into a

sequence of k frequent 1-itemset mining problems via a
set of conditional pattern bases

Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)

FP-Growth

Efficiency Analysis
Facts: usually
1. FP-tree is much smaller than the size of the DB
2. Pattern base is smaller than original FP-tree
3. Conditional FP-tree is smaller than pattern base
 mining process works on a set of usually much
smaller pattern bases and conditional FP-trees
 Divide-and-conquer and dramatic scale of shrinking

29
Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
Experiments:
Performance Evaluation

Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)

Experiments

Experiment Setup
• Compare the runtime of FP-growth with classical Apriori and recent
TreeProjection
– Runtime vs. min_sup
– Runtime per itemset vs. min_sup
– Runtime vs. size of the DB (# of transactions)
• Synthetic data sets : frequent itemsets grows exponentially as
minisup goes down
– D1: T25.I10.D10K
• 1K items
• avg(transaction size)=25
• avg(max/potential frequent item size)=10
• 10K transactions
– D2: T25.I20.D100K
• 10k items

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Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
Experiments

Scalability: runtime vs. min_sup

(w/ Apriori)

32
Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
Experiments

Runtime/itemset vs. min_sup

33
Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
Experiments
Scalability: runtime vs. # of Trans.
(w/ Apriori)

* Using D2 and min_support=1.5%

34
Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
Experiments
Scalability: runtime vs. min_support
(w/ TreeProjection)

35
Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
Experiments
Scalability: runtime vs. # of Trans.
(w/ TreeProjection)

Support = 1%

36
Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
Discussions:
Improve the performance
and scalability of FP-growth

Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)

Discussion

Performance Improvement

Disk-resident FP-tree FP-tree

Projected DBs
FP-tree Materialization Incremental update

partition the Store the FP- a low ξ may How to update

DB into a set tree in the usually satisfy an FP-tree when
of projected hark disks by most of the there are new
DBs and then using B+ tree mining queries data?
construct an structure to in the FP-tree • Reconstruct
FP-tree and reduce I/O construction. the FP-tree
mine it in each cost. • Or do not
projected DB. update the
FP-tree

38
Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
 Conclusion Remarks
• FP-tree: a novel data structure storing compressed,
crucial information about frequent patterns,
compact yet complete for frequent pattern mining.

• FP-growth: an efficient mining method of frequent

patterns in large Database: using a highly compact
FP-tree, divide-and-conquer method in nature.

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Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
 Some Notes
• In association analysis, there are two main steps,
find complete frequent patterns is the first step,
though more important step;

• Both Apriori and FP-Growth are aiming to find

out complete set of patterns;

• FP-Growth is more efficient and scalable than

Apriori in respect to prolific and long patterns.

Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)

 Related info.
• FP_growth method is (year 2000) available in DBMiner.

• Original paper appeared in SIGMOD 2000. The extended

version was just published: “Mining Frequent Patterns
without Candidate Generation: A Frequent-Pattern Tree
Approach” Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 8, 53–87,
2004. Kluwer Academic Publishers.

• Textbook: “Data Ming: Concepts and Techniques” Chapter

6.2.4 (Page 239~243)

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Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
 Exams Questions
• Q1: What are the main drawback s of Apriori –like approaches and
explain why ?
• A:
• The main disadvantages of Apriori-like approaches are:
1. It is costly to generate those candidate sets;
2. It incurs multiple scan of the database.
The reason is that: Apriori is based on the following heuristic/down-closure
property:
if any length k patterns is not frequent in the database, any length (k+1)
super-pattern can never be frequent.
The two steps in Apriori are candidate generation and test. If the 1-itemsets is
huge in the database, then the generation for successive item-sets would be
quite costly and thus the test.

42
Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
 Exams Questions
• Q2: What is FP-Tree?
• Previous answer: A FP-Tree is a tree data structure that represents the
database in a compact way. It is constructed by mapping each frequency
ordered transaction onto a path in the FP-Tree.
• My Answer: A FP-Tree is an extended prefix tree structure that represents
the transaction database in a compact and complete way. Only frequent
length-1 items will have nodes in the tree, and the tree nodes are arranged
in such a way that more frequently occurring nodes will have better
chances of sharing nodes than less frequently occurring ones. Each
transaction in the database is mapped to one path in the FP-Tree.

43
Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)
 Exams Questions
• Q3: What is the most significant advantage of FP-Tree? Why FP-Tree is
complete in relevance to frequent pattern mining?
• A: Efficiency, the most significant advantage of the FP-tree is that it
requires two scans to the underlying database (and only two scans) to
construct the FP-tree. This efficiency is further apparent in database with
prolific and long patterns or for mining frequent patterns with low support
threshold.
• As each transaction in the database is mapped to one path in the FP-Tree,
therefore, the frequent item-set information in each transaction is
completely stored in the FP-Tree. Besides, one path in the FP-Tree may
represent frequent item-sets in multiple transactions without ambiguity
since the path representing every transaction must start from the root of
each item prefix sub-tree.

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Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation (SIGMOD2000)