TopHUI: Top-k high-utility itemset mining with negative utility

In the field of data science, utility-driven data mining has become an emergent intelligent technique with wide applications. The existing utility mining algorithms usually discover all the patterns satisfying a given minimum utility threshold. However, a huge number of return results is not intuitive, not interpretable, and not easy for users to understand. Besides, it is often difficult and time-consuming for users to set a proper minimum utility threshold that is quite sensitive to the mining results. To address these issues, the problem of top-k high-utility itemset mining has been studied. In this paper, we present an efficient algorithm (named TopHUI) for finding top-k high-utility itemsets from transactional database that contains both positive and negative utility. This algorithm utilizes the positive-and-negative utility-list (PNU-list) to store the compress information, including positive, negative, and remaining utility. Besides, several threshold raising strategies and pruning strategies are proposed to prune the search space. Finally, some extensive experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed TopHUI algorithm on both real-life and synthetic datasets, particularly in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.