Targeted High-Utility Itemset Querying

Traditional high-utility itemset mining (HUIM) aims to determine all high-utility itemsets (HUIs) that satisfy the minimum utility threshold in transaction databases. However, in most applications, not all HUIs are interesting because only specific parts are required. Thus, targeted mining based on user preferences is more important than traditional mining tasks. This article is the first to propose a target-based HUIM problem and to provide a clear formulation of the targeted utility mining task in a quantitative transaction database. A tree-based algorithm known as Target-based high-Utility iteMset querying (TargetUM) is proposed. The algorithm uses a lexicographic querying tree and three effective pruning strategies to improve the mining efficiency. We implemented experimental validation on several real and synthetic databases, and the results demonstrate that the performance of TargetUM is satisfactory, complete, and correct. Finally, owing to the lexicographic querying tree, the database no longer needs to be scanned repeatedly for multiple queries. © 2020 IEEE.