Incrementally fast updated frequent pattern trees

The frequent-pattern-tree (FP-tree) is an efficient data structure for association-rule mining without generation of candidate itemsets. It was used to compress a database into a tree structure which stored only large items. It, however, needed to process all transactions in a batch way. In real-world applications, new transactions are usually inserted into databases. In this paper, we thus attempt to modify the FP-tree construction algorithm for efficiently handling new transactions. A fast updated FP-tree (FUFP-tree) structure is proposed, which makes the tree update process become easier. An incremental FUFP-tree maintenance algorithm is also proposed for reducing the execution time in reconstructing the tree when new transactions are inserted. Experimental results also show that the proposed FUFP-tree maintenance algorithm runs faster than the batch FP-tree construction algorithm for handling new transactions and generates nearly the same tree structure as the FP-tree algorithm. The proposed approach can thus achieve a good trade-off between execution time and tree complexity. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.