A Fast Algorithm for Mining Top-Rank-k Erasable Closed Patterns

The task of mining erasable patterns (EPs) is a data mining problem that can help factory managers come up with the best product plans for the future. This problem has been studied by many scientists in recent times, and many approaches for mining EPs have been proposed. Erasable closed patterns (ECPs) are an abbreviated representation of EPs and can be considered condensed representations of EPs without information loss. Current methods of mining ECPs identify huge numbers of such patterns, whereas intelligent systems only need a small number. A ranking process therefore needs to be applied prior to use, which causes a reduction in efficiency. To overcome this limitation, this study presents a robust method for mining top-rank-k ECPs in which the mining and ranking phases are combined into a single step. First, we propose a virtual-threshold-based pruning strategy to improve the mining speed. Based on this strategy and dPidset structure, we then develop a fast algorithm for mining top-rank-k ECPs, which we call TRK-ECP. Finally, we carry out experiments to compare the runtime of our TRK-ECP algorithm with two algorithms modified from dVM and TEPUS (Top-rank-k Erasable Pattern mining Using the Subsume concept), which are state-of-the-art algorithms for mining top-rank-k EPs. The results for the running time confirm that TRK-ECP outperforms the other experimental approaches in terms of mining the top-rank-k ECPs.