A Synopsis Based Approach for Itemset Frequency Estimation over Massive Multi-Transaction Stream

Abstract

The streams where multiple transactions are associated with the same key are prevalent in practice, e.g., a customer has multiple shopping records arriving at different time. Itemset frequency estimation on such streams is very challenging since sampling based methods, such as the popularly used reservoir sampling, cannot be used. In this article, we propose a novel k-Minimum Value (KMV) synopsis based method to estimate the frequency of itemsets over multi-transaction streams. First, we extract the KMV synopses for each item from the stream. Then, we propose a novel estimator to estimate the frequency of an itemset over the KMV synopses. Comparing to the existing estimator, our method is not only more accurate and efficient to calculate but also follows the downward-closure property. These properties enable the incorporation of our new estimator with existing frequent itemset mining (FIM) algorithm (e.g., FP-Growth) to mine frequent itemsets over multi-transaction streams. To demonstrate this, we implement a KMV synopsis based FIM algorithm by integrating our estimator into existing FIM algorithms, and we prove it is capable of guaranteeing the accuracy of FIM with a bounded size of KMV synopsis. Experimental results on massive streams show our estimator can significantly improve on the accuracy for both estimating itemset frequency and FIM compared to the existing estimators.