Mining frequent itemsets in evidential database

Abstract

Mining frequent patterns is widely used to discover knowledge from a database. It was originally applied on Market Basket Analysis (MBA) problem which represents the Boolean databases. In those databases, only the existence of an article (item) in a transaction is defined. However, in real-world application, the gathered information generally suffer from imperfections. In fact, a piece of information may contain two types of imperfection: imprecision and uncertainty. Recently, a new database representing and integrating those two types of imperfection were introduced: Evidential Database. Only few works have tackled those databases from a data mining point of view. In this work, we aim to discuss evidential itemset’s support. We improve the complexity of state of art methods for support’s estimation. We also introduce a new support measure gathering fastness and precision. The proposed methods are tested on several constructed evidential databases showing performance improvement.