Two-level parallel CPU/GPU-based genetic algorithm for association rule mining

Genetic algorithms (GA) are widely used in the literature to extract interesting association rules. However, they are time consuming mainly due to the growing size of databases. To speed up this process, we propose two parallel GAs (ARMGPU and ARM-CPU/GPU). In ARM-GPU, parallelism is used to compute the fitness which is the most time consuming task; while, ARM-CPU/GPU proposes a two-level-based parallel GA. In the first level, the different cores of the CPU execute a GAARM on a sub-population. The second level of parallelism is used to compute the fitness, in parallel, on GPU. To validate the proposed two parallel GAs, several tests were conducted to solve well-known large ARM instances. Obtained results show that our parallel algorithms outperform state-of-the-art exact algorithms (APRIORI and FP-GROWTH) and approximate algorithms (SEGPU and ME-GPU) in terms of execution time.