A Novel Nodesets-Based Frequent Itemset Mining Algorithm for Big Data using MapReduce

Due to the rapid growth of data from different sources in organizations, the traditional tools and techniques that cannot handle such huge data are known as big data which is in a scalable fashion. Similarly, many existing frequent itemset mining algorithms have good performance but scalability problems as they cannot exploit parallel processing power available locally or in cloud infrastructure. Since big data and cloud ecosystem overcomes the barriers or limitations in computing resources, it is a natural choice to use distributed programming paradigms such as Map Reduce. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm known as A Nodesets-based Fast and Scalable Frequent Itemset Mining (FSFIM) to extract frequent itemsets from Big Data. Here, Pre-Order Coding (POC) tree is used to represent data and improve speed in processing. Nodeset is the underlying data structure that is efficient in discovering frequent itemsets. FSFIM is found to be faster and more scalable in mining frequent itemsets. When compared with its predecessors such as Node-lists and N-lists, the Nodesets save half of the memory as they need only either pre-order or post-order coding. Cloudera's Distribution of Hadoop (CDH), a MapReduce framework, is used for empirical study. A prototype application is built to evaluate the performance of the FSFIM. Experimental results revealed that FSFIM outperforms existing algorithms such as Mahout PFP, Mlib PFP, and Big FIM. FSFIM is more scalable and found to be an ideal candidate for real-time applications that mine frequent itemsets from Big Data.