PrefixFPM: A Parallel Framework for General-Purpose Frequent Pattern Mining

Abstract

Frequent pattern mining (FPM) has been a focused theme in data mining research for decades, but there lacks a general programming framework that can be easily customized to mine different kinds of frequent patterns, and existing solutions to FPM over big transaction databases are IO-bound rendering CPU cores underutilized even though FPM is NP-hard.This paper presents, PrefixFPM, a general-purpose framework for FPM that is able to fully utilize the CPU cores in a multicore machine. PrefixFPM follows the idea of prefix projection to partition the workloads of PFM into independent tasks by divide and conquer. PrefixFPM exposes a unified programming interface to users who can customize it to mine their desired patterns, and the parallel execution engine is transparent to end-users and can be reused for mining all kinds of patterns. We have adapted the state-of-the-art serial algorithms for mining frequent patterns including subsequences, subtrees, and subgraphs on top of PrefixFPM, and extensive experiments demonstrate an excellent speedup ratio of PrefixFPM with the number of cores.A demo is available at https://youtu.be/PfioC0GDpsw; the code is available at https://github.com/yanlab19870714/PrefixFPM.