Abstract

Traditional association rule mining algorithms only generate a large number of highly frequent rules, but these rules do not provide useful answers for what the high utility rules are. We develop a novel idea of top-K objective-directed data mining, which focuses on mining the top-K high utility closed patterns that directly support a given business objective. To association mining, we add the concept of utility to capture highly desirable statistical patterns and present a level-wise item-set mining algorithm. With both positive and negative utilities, the antimonotone pruning strategy in Apriori algorithm no longer holds. In response, we develop a new pruning strategy based on utilities that allow pruning of low utility itemsets to be done by means of a weaker but antimonotonic condition. Our experimental results show that our algorithm does not require a user specified minimum utility and hence is effective in practice.