An Improved Algorithm for Extracting Frequent Gradual Patterns

Frequent gradual pattern extraction is an important problem in computer science widely studied by the data mining community. Such a pattern reflects a co-variation between attributes of a database. The applications of the extraction of the gradual patterns concern several fields, in particular, biology, finances, health and metrology. The algorithms for extracting these patterns are greedy in terms of memory and computational resources. This clearly poses the problem of improving their performance. This paper proposes a new approach for the extraction of gradual and frequent patterns based on the reduction of candidate generation and processing costs by exploiting frequent itemsets whose size is a power of two to generate all candidates. The analysis of the complexity, in terms of CPU time and memory usage, and the experiments show that the obtained algorithm outperforms the previous ones and confirms the interest of the proposed approach. It is sometimes at least 5 times faster than previous algorithms and requires at most half the memory. PDF  XML