FFS - An I/O-Efficient Algorithm for Mining Frequent Sequences

Minghua Zhang, Ben Kao, Chi Lap Yip, David Wai-Lok Cheung

Abstract: This paper studies the problem of mining frequent sequences in transactional databases. In [1], Agrawal and Srikant proposed the AprioriAll algorithm for extracting frequently occurring sequences. AprioriAll is an iterative algorithm. It scans the database a number of times depending on the length of the longest frequent sequences in the database. The I/O cost is thus substantial if the database contains very long frequent sequences. In this paper, we propose a new I/O-efficient algorithm FFS. Experiment results show that FFS saves I/O cost significantly compared with AprioriAll. The I/O saving is obtained at a cost of a mild overhead in CPU cost.