Symmetric Item Set Mining Method Using ZBDDs and Application to Biological Data

(Abstract) In this paper, we present a method of finding symmetric items in a combinatorial item set database. The techniques for finding symmetric variables in Boolean functions have been studied for long time in the area of VLSI logic design, and the BDD (Binary Decision Diagram)-based methods are presented to solve such a problem. Recently , we have developed an efficient method for handling databases using ZBDDs (Zero-suppressed BDDs), a particular type of BDDs. In our ZBDD-based data structure, the symmetric item sets can be found efficiently as well as for Boolean functions. We implemented the program of symmetric item set mining, and applied it to actual biological data on the amino acid sequences of influenza viruses. We found a number of symmetric items from the database, some of which indicate interesting relationships in the amino acid mutation patterns. The result shows that our method is helpful for extracting hidden interesting information in real-life databases.