Item Sets that Compress

One of the major problems in frequent item set mining is the explosion of the number of results: it is difficult to find the most interesting frequent item sets. The cause of this explosion is that large sets of frequent item sets describe essentially the same set of transactions. In this paper we approach this problem using the MDL principle: the best set of frequent item sets is that set that compresses the database best. We introduce four heuristic algorithms for this task, and the experiments show that these algorithms give a dramatic reduction in the number of frequent item sets. Moreover, we show how our approach can be used to determine the best value for the min-sup threshold.