# Frequent Pattern Mining

A frequent pattern is a substructure that appears frequently in a dataset. Finding the frequent patterns of a dataset is a essential step in data mining tasks such as feature extraction and association rule learning. The frequent pattern mining toolkit provides tools for extracting and analyzing frequent patterns in pattern data.

##### Introductory Example

Let us look a simple example of receipt data from a bakery. The dataset consists of items like ApplePie and GanacheCookie. The task is to identify sets of items that are frequently bought together. The dataset consists of 266209 rows and 6 columns which look like the following. The dataset was constructed by modifying the Extended BAKERY dataset..

Data:
+---------+-------------+-------+----------+----------+-----------------+
| Receipt |   SaleDate  | EmpId | StoreNum | Quantity |       Item      |
+---------+-------------+-------+----------+----------+-----------------+
|    1    | 12-JAN-2000 |   20  |    20    |    1     |  GanacheCookie  |
|    1    | 12-JAN-2000 |   20  |    20    |    5     |     ApplePie    |
|    2    | 15-JAN-2000 |   35  |    10    |    1     |   CoffeeEclair  |
|    2    | 15-JAN-2000 |   35  |    10    |    3     |     ApplePie    |
|    2    | 15-JAN-2000 |   35  |    10    |    4     |   AlmondTwist   |
|    2    | 15-JAN-2000 |   35  |    10    |    3     |    HotCoffee    |
|    3    |  8-JAN-2000 |   13  |    13    |    5     |    OperaCake    |
|    3    |  8-JAN-2000 |   13  |    13    |    3     |   OrangeJuice   |
|    3    |  8-JAN-2000 |   13  |    13    |    3     | CheeseCroissant |
|    4    | 24-JAN-2000 |   16  |    16    |    1     |   TruffleCake   |
+---------+-------------+-------+----------+----------+-----------------+
[266209 rows x 6 columns]


In order to run a frequent pattern mining algorithm, we require an item columns, (the column Item in this example), and a set of feature columns that uniquely identify a transaction (the column Receipt in this example).

In just a few lines of code we can do the following:

• Find the most frequently occurring patters satisfying various conditions.
• Extract features from the dataset by transforming it from the Item space into the Reciept space. These features can then be used for applications like clustering, classification, churn prediction, recommender systems etc.
• Make predictions based on new data using rules learned from sets of items that occur frequently together.

Here is a simple end-to-end example:

import graphlab as gl

train = gl.SFrame("https://static.turi.com/datasets/extended-bakery/bakery_train.sf")
test = gl.SFrame("https://static.turi.com/datasets/extended-bakery/bakery_test.sf")

# Make a train-test split.
train, test = bakery_sf.random_split(0.8)

# Build a frequent pattern miner model.
model = gl.frequent_pattern_mining.create(train, 'Item',
features=['Receipt'], min_length=4, max_patterns=500)

# Obtain the most frequent patterns.
patterns = model.get_frequent_patterns()

# Extract features from the dataset and use in other models!
features = model.extract_features(train)

# Make predictions based on frequent patterns.
predictions = model.predict(test)

###### Interpreting Results

Frequent pattern mining can provide valuable insight about the sets of items that occur frequently together. When a model is trained, the model.summary() output shows the most frequently occurring patterns together.

patterns = model.get_frequent_patterns()
print patterns

+-------------------------------------------------------------+---------+
|                           pattern                           | support |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+---------+
|       [CoffeeEclair, HotCoffee, ApplePie, AlmondTwist]      |   1671  |
|     [AppleTart, AppleDanish, AppleCroissant, CherrySoda]    |   1227  |
|     [CherryTart, ApricotDanish, OperaCake, ApricotTart]     |    58   |
|     [CherryTart, ApricotDanish, OperaCake, AppleDanish]     |    56   |
|   [CherryTart, ApricotDanish, GongolaisCookie, OperaCake]   |    54   |
|    [CherryTart, ApricotDanish, OperaCake, VanillaEclair]    |    53   |
|    [CherryTart, ApricotDanish, OperaCake, LemonLemonade]    |    53   |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+---------+
[500 rows x 2 columns]


Note that the pattern column contains the patterns that occur frequently together and the support column contains the number of times these patterns occur together in the entire dataset. In this example, the pattern [CoffeeEclair, HotCoffee, ApplePie, AlmondTwist] occurred 860 times in the training data.

A frequent pattern is a set of items with a support greater than user-specified minimum support threshold. However, there is significant redundancy in mining frequent patterns; every subset of a frequent pattern is also frequent (e.g. CoffeeEclair must be frequent if CoffeeEclair, HotCoffee is frequent). The frequent pattern mining toolkit avoids this redundancy by mining the closed frequent patterns: frequent patterns with no superset of the same support.

###### Minimum support

One can change the minimum support above which patterns are considered frequent using the min_support setting:

model = gl.frequent_pattern_mining.create(train, 'Item',
features=['Receipt'], min_support = 5000)
print model

Class                         : FrequentPatternMiner

Model fields
------------
Min support                   : 5000
Max patterns                  : 100
Min pattern length            : 1

Most frequent patterns
----------------------
['CoffeeEclair']              : 6582
['HotCoffee']                 : 6131
['StrawberryCake']            : 5624
['CherryTart']                : 5613
['ApricotDanish']             : 5582
['OrangeJuice']               : 5495
['BerryTart']                 : 5087

###### Top-k frequent patterns.

In practice, we rarely know the appropriate min_support threshold to use. As an alternative to specifying a minimum support, we can specify a maximum number of patterns to mine using the max_patterns parameter. Instead of mining all patterns above a minimum support threshold, we mine the most frequent patterns until the maximum number of closed patterns are round. For large data sets, this mining process can be time-consuming. We recommend specifying a large initial minimum support bound to speed up the mining.

model = gl.frequent_pattern_mining.create(train, 'Item',
features=['Receipt'], max_patterns = 5)
print model

Class                         : FrequentPatternMiner

Model fields
------------
Min support                   : 1
Max patterns                  : 5
Min pattern length            : 1

Most frequent patterns
----------------------
['CoffeeEclair']              : 6582
['HotCoffee']                 : 6131
['StrawberryCake']            : 5624
['CherryTart']                : 5613


Note: The algorithm for extracting the top-k most frequent occurring patterns can be severely sped up with a good estimate for the lower bound on min_support.

###### Minimum Length

Typically, the most frequent patterns are of length 1. However, in practice, patterns of length 1 may not very useful. To mine patterns greater than a minimum length, we use the min_length parameter:

model = gl.frequent_pattern_mining.create(train, 'Item',
features=['Receipt'], min_length = 5)
print model

Class                         : FrequentPatternMiner

Model fields
------------
Min support                   : 1
Max patterns                  : 100
Min pattern length            : 5

Most frequent patterns
----------------------
['CoffeeEclair', 'HotCoffee', 'VanillaFrappuccino', 'ApplePie', 'AlmondTwist']: 21
['CoffeeEclair', 'HotCoffee', 'ApplePie', 'AlmondTwist', 'VanillaMeringue']: 21
['CoffeeEclair', 'HotCoffee', 'ApplePie', 'AlmondTwist', 'LemonTart']: 20
['CoffeeEclair', 'HotCoffee', 'NapoleonCake', 'ApplePie', 'AlmondTwist']: 19
['CoffeeEclair', 'HotCoffee', 'MarzipanCookie', 'ApplePie', 'AlmondTwist']: 17
['CoffeeEclair', 'HotCoffee', 'ApplePie', 'AlmondTwist', 'CherrySoda']: 17
['CoffeeEclair', 'HotCoffee', 'ApplePie', 'AlmondTwist', 'LemonLemonade']: 17
['CoffeeEclair', 'HotCoffee', 'GongolaisCookie', 'ApplePie', 'AlmondTwist']: 16
['CoffeeEclair', 'HotCoffee', 'CherryTart', 'ApplePie', 'AlmondTwist']: 16


Note: The three parameters min_support, max_patterns, and min_length can be combined to find patterns satisfying all conditions.

###### Extracting Features

Using the set of closed patterns, we can convert pattern data to binary features vectors. These feature vectors can be used for other machine learning tasks, such as clustering or classification. For each input pattern , the j-th extracted feature is a binary indicator of whether the j-th closed pattern is contained in .

model = gl.frequent_pattern_mining.create(train, 'Item',
features=['Receipt'])
features = model.extract_features(test)

Columns:
Receipt    int
extracted_features    array

Rows: 15000

Data:
+---------+-------------------------------+
| Receipt |       extracted_features      |
+---------+-------------------------------+
|  63664  | [0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, ... |
|  62361  | [0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, ... |
|  66110  | [0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0, ... |
|  61406  | [0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, ... |
|  69188  | [0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, ... |
|  65762  | [0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, ... |
|  74562  | [0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, ... |
|  66750  | [0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, ... |
|  60908  | [1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, ... |
|  62213  | [0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, ... |
+---------+-------------------------------+
[15000 rows x 2 columns]


Once the features are extracted, we can use them downstream in other applications such as clustering, classification, churn prediction, recommender systems etc.

###### Making Predictions

An association rule is an ordered pair of item sets (prefix , prediction ) denoted such that are disjoint and is frequent. Because every frequent pattern generates multiple association rules (a rule for each subset), we evaluate and filter rules using a score criteria. The most popular criteria for scoring association rules is to measure the confidence of the rule: the ratio of the support of to the support of . The confidence of the rule is our empirical estimate of the conditional probability for given :

One can make predictions using the predict or predict_topk method for single and multiple predictions respectively. The output of both the methods is an SFrame with the following columns:

• prefix: The antecedent or left-hand side of an association rule. It must be a frequent pattern and a subset of the associated pattern.
• prediction: The consequent or right-hand side of the association rule. It must be disjoint of the prefix.
• confidence: The confidence of the association rule as defined above.
• prefix support: The frequency of the prefix pattern in the training data.
• joint support: The frequency of the co-occurrence ( prefix + prediction) in the training data

If no valid association rule exists for an pattern, then predict will return a row of Nones.

predictions = model.predict(test)

Columns:
Receipt    int
prefix    list
prediction    list
confidence    float
prefix support    int
joint support    int

Rows: 15000

Data:
+---------+------------------+----------------+----------------+----------------+
| Receipt |      prefix      |   prediction   |   confidence   | prefix support |
+---------+------------------+----------------+----------------+----------------+
|  63664  |        []        | [CoffeeEclair] | 0.109701828364 |     59999      |
|  62361  |   [OperaCake]    |  [CherryTart]  | 0.531376518219 |      4940      |
|  66110  | [ApricotDanish]  |  [CherryTart]  | 0.574883554282 |      5582      |
|  61406  |        []        | [CoffeeEclair] | 0.109701828364 |     59999      |
|  69188  | [ApricotDanish]  |  [CherryTart]  | 0.574883554282 |      5582      |
|  65762  |        []        | [CoffeeEclair] | 0.109701828364 |     59999      |
|  74562  |   [HotCoffee]    | [CoffeeEclair] |  0.3069646061  |      6131      |
|  66750  |   [OperaCake]    |  [CherryTart]  | 0.531376518219 |      4940      |
|  62213  | [StrawberryCake] | [NapoleonCake] | 0.464971550498 |      5624      |
+---------+------------------+----------------+----------------+----------------+
+---------------+
| joint support |
+---------------+
|      6582     |
|      2625     |
|      3209     |
|      6582     |
|      3209     |
|      6582     |
|      1882     |
|      2625     |
|      3023     |
|      2615     |
+---------------+
[15001 rows x 6 columns]


Note: If the number of patterns extracted is large, then prediction could potentially be a slow operation.

##### Accessing Model Attributes

We will now go over some more advanced options with the frequent pattern mining module. This includes advanced options for pattern mining, model interpretation, extracting features, and making predictions via rule mining.

The attributes of all GraphLab Create models, which include training statistics, model hyper-parameters, and model results can be accessed in the same way as python dictionaries. To get a list of all fields that can be accessed, you can use the list_fields() function:

fields = model.list_fields()
print fields
['features',
'frequent_patterns',
'item',
'max_patterns',
'min_length',
'min_support',
'num_examples',
'num_features',
'num_frequent_patterns',
'num_items',
'training_time']


Each of these fields can be accessed using dictionary-like lookups. For example, the num_frequent_patterns is the number of frequent patterns extracted by the model.

model['num_frequent_patterns']
500


The API docs provide a detailed description of each of the model attributes.

## References

• Han, Jiawei, et al. Frequent pattern mining: current status and future directions. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery 15.1 (2007): 55-86.
• Han, Jiawei, Micheline Kamber, and Jian Pei. Data mining: concepts and techniques: concepts and techniques. Elsevier, 2011.
• Wang, Jianyong, et al. TFP: An efficient algorithm for mining top-k frequent closed patterns. Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on 17.5 (2005): 652-663.