Towards fast and memory efficient discovery of periodic frequent patterns

Periodic frequent pattern (PFP) mining, the process of discovering frequent patterns that occur at regular periods in databases, is an important data mining task for various decision-making. Although several algorithms have been proposed for discovering PFPs, most of these algorithms often employ a two-stage approach to mining these periodic frequent patterns. That is, by firstly deriving the set of periods of a pattern from its coverset and subsequently evaluating the patterns' periodicity from the derived set of periods. This two-stage approach in discovering periodic frequent patterns as a result make existing algorithms inefficient in both runtime and memory usage. This paper presents solutions towards reducing the runtime, as well as, memory usage in discovering periodic frequent patterns. This is achieved by evaluating the periodicity of patterns without deriving the set of periods from their coversets. Experimental analysis on benchmark datasets show that the proposed solutions are efficient in reducing both the runtime and memory usage in mining periodic frequent patterns.