International Journal of Advanced Research in Engineering and Technology (IJARET)

Volume 8, Issue 1, January- February 2017, pp. 7885, Article ID: IJARET_08_01_008
Available online at http://www.iaeme.com/IJARET/issues.asp?JType=IJARET&VType=8&IType=1
ISSN Print: 0976-6480 and ISSN Online: 0976-6499
IAEME Publication

COMPARATIVE STUDY OF DISTRIBUTED

FREQUENT PATTERN MINING ALGORITHMS FOR
BIG SALES DATA
Dinesh J. Prajapati
Research Scholar, Department of Computer Science & Engineering,
Institute of Technology, Nirma University, Ahmedabad, India

ABSTRACT
Association rule mining plays an important role in decision support system. Nowadays in the
era of internet, various online marketing sites and social networking sites are generating enormous
amount of structural/semi structural data in the form of sales data, tweets, emails, web pages and
so on. This online generated data is too large that it becomes very complex to process and analyze
it using traditional systems which consumes more time. This paper overcomes the main memory
bottleneck in single computing system. There are two major goals of this paper. In this paper, big
sales dataset of AMUL dairy is preprocessed using Hadoop Map Reduce that convert it into the
transactional dataset. Then, after removing the null transactions; distributed frequent pattern
mining algorithm MR-DARM (Map Reduce based Distributed Association Rule Mining) is used to
find most frequent item set. Finally, strong association rules are generated from frequent item sets.
The paper also compares the time efficiency of MR-DARM algorithm with existing Count
Distributed Algorithm (CDA) and Fast Distributed Mining (FDM) distributed frequent pattern
mining algorithms. The compared algorithms are presented together with experimental results that
lead to the final conclusions.
Key words: Association rule, distributed frequent pattern mining, hadoop, map reduces.
Cite this Article: Dinesh J. Prajapati, Comparative Study of Distributed Frequent Pattern Mining
Algorithms for Big Sales Data. International Journal of Advanced Research in Engineering and
Technology, 8(1), 2017, pp 7885.
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1. INTRODUCTION
The process of data mining is to extract the useful information and patterns for the knowledge discovery
process. One of the techniques used in data mining is called association rule mining. Association rule
mining is the data mining task of uncovering relationships in the data. It is a popular model in the retail
sales industry where a company is interested in identifying items that are frequently purchased together.
An association rule is expressed in the form X Y, where X and Y are the itemsets. This rule exposes the
relationship between the itemset X with the itemset Y. The interestingness of the rule X Y is measured
by the support and confidence [1, 2]. The rule X Y has minimum support value min_sup if min_sup
percent of transactions support XUY, the rule X Y holds with minimum confidence value min_conf if
min_conf percent of transactions which support X also support Y [3, 4]. Association rule mining process
basically consists of two steps: (i) Finding all the frequent itemsets that satisfies minimum support

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 Dinesh J. Prajapati

thresholds and, (ii) Generating strong association rules from derived frequent itemsets. Big data is termed
for a collection of large data sets which are complex and difficult to process using traditional data
processing tools [5].
In brief, the contribution of this paper is summarized in three steps: i) First of all, the distributed
frequent itemset mining algorithms CDA, FDM and MR-DARM are used to generate the complete set of
frequent itemsets and results are compared, (iv) Proposed framework mines not only frequent itemsets, but
also mines distributors sales association rules in transactional datasets to analyze total sales based on the
distributor. (v) Finally, based on user defined thresholds, the complete set of distributors sales strong
association rules are generated with the interesting patterns. The CDA, FDM and MR-DARM distributed
frequent mining algorithms are tested on sales dataset of AMUL Dairy.
The remaining of the paper is organized as follows. Related work is given in section 2. Section 3 shows
the proposed methodology. In Section 4, the performance of CDA, FDM and MR-DARM algorithms are
evaluated on sales dataset of AMUL dairy. Finally, the conclusion and future scope is drawn in section 5.

2. RELATED WORK
Authors in [6] proposed performance analysis factors like heterogeneous and autonomous. The authors
also proposed a complex theorem which characterizes the features of both the big data revolution and big
data processing model. Authors analyze the challenging issues in the data mining model and also in the big
data analysis. Authors in [7] proposed imminent about big data mining infrastructures and analysis of
Twitter. In this paper two major topics are discussed. First, schemas are insufficient to provide the
knowledge of understanding the petabytes or terabytes of data. Second, a major challenge for analyzing the
data is the heterogeneity of the various components. The objective of this paper is to share experiences of
authors to analyze the data from Twitter in the area of production environment. Authors in [8] proposed an
optimized distributed association rule mining approach to reduce the communication cost for
geographically distributed data. The communication as well as computation time is considered to achieve
an improved response time. The performance analysis is done based on scalability of processors in
distributed environment. Authors in [9] proposed distributed trie based algorithm (DTFIM) to find frequent
item sets. In this paper, authors proposed Bodons algorithm based on no shared memory in distributed
computing environment. The proposed algorithm is revised with some frequent data mining algorithm.
Authors in [10] proposed a distributed system for mining the transactional datasets using an improved Map
Reduce framework. In this paper, authors implemented Associated-Correlated-Independent algorithm to
find the complete set of customers purchase patterns along with the correlated, associated, associated-
correlated, and independent purchase patterns.
The PARMA algorithm proposed in [11] provides great improvements to the runtime of finding
association rules. PARMA achieves this by utilizing probabilistic results, it only approximates the answers.
Another statistical approach was presented in [12]. This solution uses clustering to create groups of
transactions and chooses candidate sets from the representative item sets in the clusters. Authors in [13]
present improved version of the frequent item set mining algorithm as well as its generalized version. The
authors introduced optimized formulas for generating valid candidates by reducing number of invalid
candidates. By using the computations of previous steps by other processed nodes, it avoids generating
redundant candidates. Authors also suggested to run the same algorithm in parallel or distributed system.
The Count Distribution Algorithm (CDA) [14] provides fundamental distributed association rule
algorithm. In this paper, each node contains huge number of frequent item sets and counts candidate item
set locally. These count values are stored in the local database and maintains incoming count values. All
the computing nodes execute the Apriori algorithm locally and after reading count values from the local
database they broadcast respective count values to the remaining nodes. Each of the nodes can generate
new candidate itemset based on the global counter. The FDM (Fast Distributed Mining) algorithm [15]
provides candidate set generation algorithm similar to Apriori. The interesting property of local as well as
global frequent itemset is used to generate a reduced set of candidates for the each iteration. Thus the

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 Comparative Study of Distributed Frequent Pattern Mining Algorithms for Big Sales Data

number of messages interchanged between each node reduces. Once the candidate sets are generated, then
local reduction and global reduction techniques are applied to eliminate few candidate sets from each site.
In big data analysis, mining long patterns is more important for the transactional database having
unique item set. However, none of the above mentioned work deals with the problem of data
transformation and elimination of null transactions using Map Reduce. Therefore, data transformation and
finding null transactions and then eliminating it for the future consideration; is the initial part of this
proposed methodology. After removing null transactions, distributed frequent mining algorithm is applied
to generate useful patterns. Existing CDA and FDM algorithm generates large candidate set, uses more
number of message passing system and execution time is also higher while mining big data. The MR-
DARM algorithm improves the drawback of CDA and FDM algorithms and generates useful patterns. The
objective of this work is to remove the drawbacks of relational database and facilitate the existing Map
Reduce framework; to generate the complete set of frequent itemsets with smaller candidate set
generations, less message passing and improvement in the execution time of the system.

3. PROPOSED METHODOLOGY
The CDA and FDM algorithms are data parallelism algorithm [15]. In CDA algorithm, the dataset is
divided into n number of partitions, each partition is given to separate node. Each node counts the
candidates and then broadcasts its counts to remaining nodes. Each node then determines the global counts.
The global counts are used to determine the large item sets and to generate the candidates for the next
iteration. In FDM algorithm, candidate set is generated similar to Apriori algorithm. To reduce the size of
candidates at each iteration, local and global frequent item sets are used which result reduction in the
number of messages interchanged between nodes. Once the candidate sets are generated, local reduction
and global reduction techniques are applied on each site to eliminate redundant candidate sets. The main
drawback of CDA and FDM algorithm is that both generates large candidate set, uses more number of
message passing system and execution time is higher while mining big data. These drawbacks can be
improved by Map Reduce so the new approach is developed.
The MR-DARM algorithm is used to find frequent item sets from the actual transactional dataset. Once
the actual transactional dataset is stored in HDFS, the entire dataset is split into the smaller segments and
then each segment is transformed to data nodes. The map function is executed on each data segments and it
produces <key, value> pairs for each record of database. The Map Reduce framework groups all <key,
value> pairs, which have the same items and call the reducer function by passing value list for generating
candidate item sets. In each database scan, map function generates local candidate item sets, then the
reduce function generates global counts by adding local count values. For the overall computation,
multiple iterations of Map Reduce functions are necessary. Each of the Map Reduce iteration produces a
frequent item set. The iteration continues until no further frequent item sets are found. The reduce function
adds up all the values produce by Mapper and generates a count for the candidate item. The main
advantage of this approach is that it doesnt exchange data between each node, but it only exchanges the
count values. The MR-DARM algorithm uses notation Ck as a set of candidate k-item set and Lk as a set of
frequent k-itemset which is shown in Fig. 1.

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 Dinesh J. Prajapati

Input: Transactional Database in HDFS (D),

(
Minimum Support Threshold (min_sup)
(
Output: Frequent Itemsets (L) (
Method:
L1 = find frequent 1-itemsets
1 from D.
For each frequent k-itemset do
Ck = Lk-1 Lk-1. // Generates candidate itemset
Ct = Map(). // Generates itemset occurrence
Lk = Reduce (). // Gets the subset of frequent itemsets
L = L Uk Lk.
Map Function:
Input: Set of Transaction ( Ti )
Output: < Candidate Itemset,
Itemset Value>
Method:
For each transaction Ti D do
For each itemset Ii in Candidate Itemset Ck do
If ( Ii Ti ) then
Generate the output < Ii, 1>
as < Key,, Value> pair.
Reduce Function:
Input: < candidate
andidate itemset, list >
Output: < frequent itemset, support_count >
Method:
count = 0.
For each number in list do
count + = number.
number
If ( count > = Min_sup ) then
Generate the output < frequent itemset, count >
as < key, value > pair.

Figure 1 The MR-DARM Algorithm

The transactional data is given as an input to the Mapper line by line. Each line is split into items and
the output <key, value> pair consists of the item and the value 1. This is the local frequency of the item.
The reduce task starts with the itemsets of length 1 and generates candidates with length 2. During step k
of the algorithm it will start with length n itemsets and generate
generate length k + 1 candidate itemsets. If the
reduce task cannot generate bigger candidate itemsets it will stop the whole computation. Frequent
itemsets are calculated based on different values of minimum support threshold. Support decision system
will check for the appropriate support count value for generating strong association rules.

3.1. Association Rule Generation

The output of distributed frequent mining algorithm is frequent itemsets which will be given as input to the
association rule generator module
le to generate strong association rules which satisfies minimum confidence
threshold. Association rules can be generated as follows [16].
[
For each frequent itemset, l, generate all non-empty subsets of l.

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 Comparative Study of Distributed Frequent Pattern Mining Algorithms for Big Sales Data

For every non-empty

empty subset s of l, output the rule s (l-s) if (Support (l)
( / Support (s)) >= min_conf,
where min_conf is the minimum confidence threshold.
Since, the rules are generated from frequent itemsets; each rule automatically satisfies minimum
support.

4.. EXPERIMENTAL SETUP & RESULTS

For the experimental purpose cluster of four desktop machines consists of i5 processor with 4 GB DDR-3 DDR
RAM are used. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating system is installed in all the four computers. Usually JVM is
not a part of Ubuntu 12.04, so, JVM is also installed
installed it in all the four computers. Multi-node
Multi cluster is
configured in three computers and single-node
single node cluster is configured in single computer using Apache
Hadoop packages.
For this experiment, the sales database of AMUL dairy with more than 1500 different differen dairy product
having total size of 5GB is used. In dairy dataset, sales of the dairy product are done based on concept
hierarchy. First of all product is send to the distributor which in turn distribute the product to the retailer
and finally the retailerr will sell the dairy product to the customer.

4.1. Comparative Study of CDA, FDM and MR-DARM Algorithm

After transforming transactional dataset into actual transactional dataset, actual transaction file is given as
input to the frequent pattern mining algorithm
al to find the frequent itemsets. The results of CDA, FDM and
MR-DARM algorithms on AMUL datasets for the varying database size 256MB, 512MB, 1GB, 2GB and
5GB is applied using single node, two node and three node clusters with minimum support threshold
threshol of 1%
which are shown in Fig. 2, 3 and 4 respectively. The result shows that the performance of the algorithm
depends on the number of nodes and the size of dataset. For a data set of size 5GB that was distributed on
single node, the execution time for thet CDA, FDM and MR-DARM algorithms are 5670 seconds, 3680
seconds and 373 seconds respectively, while the same data set distributed on three node cluster produced
an execution time of 3490 seconds, 2280 seconds and 269 seconds respectively. So, in order to obtain
comparatively small execution times, the number of nodes must be increase with increase in the database
size. It is noticeable that the performance of the algorithms increases with increase in number of nodes, and
the proposed algorithm gives much better performance than CDA as well as FDM when the size of the
dataset is large.

Figure 2 Dataset Size Vs Execution Time for Single Node Cluster with 1% Minimum Support

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 Dinesh J. Prajapati

Figure 3 Dataset Size Vs Execution Time for Two Node Cluster with 1% Minimum Support
Sup

Figure 4 Dataset Size Vs Execution Time for Three Node Cluster with 1% Minimum Support

5. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE SCOPE

HDFS and MapReduce play really an important role for handling and analyzing of large datasets.
However, most of the algorithms have limitation of processing speed. In this paper, hadoop based
distributed approach is presented which process the transactional dataset into partitions and transfers the
task to all participating nodes. The purpose is to reduce inter node message passing in the cluster. In
preprocessing using Hadoop MapReduce, it has been observed that as the number of reducer increases, the
execution time is significantly decreases. The experimental
experimental results show that the parallel processing task
scales linearly with the number of nodes and the size of the dataset. In this paper, The MR-DARM
algorithm is implemented to find distributed frequent itemsets. As the number of node is increased, the
performance
ormance is really improved by considering lower minimum support factor and large database size. The
proposed algorithm generates a smaller candidate set and uses a less message passing than CDA and FDM
algorithm, thus the execution time of the proposed algorithm
algorithm is less as compare to others. The proposed
algorithm is more flexible, scalable and efficient distributed frequent pattern mining algorithm for mining
large data.

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 Comparative Study of Distributed Frequent Pattern Mining Algorithms for Big Sales Data

The time efficiency of the algorithm may be improved by using FP-tree based data structures for the
candidate itemset generation.

6. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors take this opportunity to thank all the researchers from the domain of big data analysis for their
immense knowledge and kind support throughout the work. Also would like to thank our institute for their
resources and constant inspiration. Special thanks to the authority of AMUL dairy located at Anand district
for providing sales dataset. At last heartiest thanks to our family and friends for encouraging us to make
this a success.

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