Augmented Apriori by Simulating Map-Reduce

Association rule mining is a data mining technique which is used to identify decision-making patterns by analyzing datasets. Many association rule mining techniques exist to find various relationships among itemsets. The techniques proposed in the literature are processed using non-distributed platform in which the entire dataset is sustained till all transactions are processed and the transactions are scanned sequentially. They require more space and are time consuming techniques when large amounts of data are considered. An efficient technique is needed to find association rules from big data set to minimize the space as well as time. Thus, this paper aims to enhance the efficiency of association rule mining of big transaction database both in terms of memory and speed by processing the big transaction database as distributed file system in Map-Reduce framework. The proposed method organizes the transactions into clusters and the clusters are distributed among many parallel processors in a distributed platform. This distribution makes the clusters to be processed simultaneously to find itemsets which enhances the performance both in memory and speed. Then, frequent itemsets are discovered using minimum support threshold. Associations are generated from frequent itemsets and finally interesting rules are found using minimum confidence threshold. The efficiency of the proposed method is enhanced in a noticeably higher level both in terms of memory and speed.