On exploring the power-law relationship in the itemset support distribution

Abstract

We identify and explore in this paper an important phenomenon which points out that the power-law relationship appears in the distribution of itemset supports. Characterizing such a relationship will benefit many applications such as providing the direction of tuning the performance of the frequent-itemset mining. Nevertheless, due to the explosive number of itemsets, it will be prohibitively expensive to retrieve characteristics of the power-law relationship in the distribution of itemset supports. As such, we also propose in this paper a valid and cost-effective algorithm, called algorithm PPL, to extract characteristics of the distribution without the need of discovering all itemsets in advance. Experimental results demonstrate that algorithm PPL is able to efficiently extract the characteristics of the power-law relationship with high accuracy. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.