Towards efficient discovery of coverage patterns in transactional databases

Coverage pattern mining is an important model in data mining. It provides useful information pertaining to the sets of items that have coverage interesting to the users in a transactional database. The coverage patterns do not satisfy the anti-monotonic property. This increases the search space in the itemset lattice, which in turn increases the computational cost of mining these patterns. An Apriori-like algorithm known as CMine has been proposed in the literature to discover the patterns. It employs a pruning technique to reduce the search space. We have observed that there exists further scope for reducing the search space effectively. In this paper, we theoretically analyze different measures used in the pattern model, and introduce a novel pruning technique to reduce the search space. An Apriori-like algorithm, called CMine++, has also been proposed to discover the patterns. The performance study shows that mining coverage patterns with CMine++ is efficient.