A Novel Approach on Mining Frequent Item Sets on Large Uncertain Databases

The data handled in emerging applications like location-based services, sensor monitoring systems and data integration, are often inexact in nature. In this paper, we study the important problem of extracting frequent item sets from a large uncertain database, interpreted under the Possible World Semantics (PWS). This issue is technically challenging, since an uncertain database contains an exponential number of possible worlds. By observing that the mining process can be modeled as a Poisson binomial distribution, we develop an approximate algorithm, which can efficiently and accurately discover frequent item sets in a large uncertain database. The important issue of maintaining the mining result for a database that is evolving was discussed. Specifically, we propose incremental mining algorithm, which enable Probabilistic Frequent Item Set (PFI) results to be refreshed. This reduces the need of re-executing the whole mining algorithm on the new database, which is often more expensive and unnecessary. All our approaches support both tuple and attribute uncertainty, which are two common uncertain database models. We also perform extensive evaluation on real and synthetic data sets to validate our approaches.