Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques, 3rd Edition

7.5 Mining Compressed or Approximate Patterns

A major challenge in frequent pattern mining is the huge number of discovered patterns. Using a minimum support threshold to control the number of patterns found has limited effect. Too low a value can lead to the generation of an explosive number of output patterns, while too high a value can lead to the discovery of only commonsense patterns.

To reduce the huge set of frequent patterns generated in mining while maintaining high-quality patterns, we can instead mine a compressed or approximate set of frequent patterns. Top-k most frequent closed patterns were proposed to make the mining process concentrate on only the set of k most frequent patterns. Although interesting, they usually do not epitomize ...