An efficient algorithm for mining frequent inter-transaction patterns

In this paper, we propose an efficient method for mining all frequent inter-transaction patterns. The method consists of two phases. First, we devise two data structures: a dat-list, which stores the item information used to find frequent intertransaction patterns; and an ITP-tree, which stores the discovered frequent inter-transaction patterns. In the second phase, we apply an algorithm, called ITP-Miner (Inter-Transaction Patterns Miner), to mine all frequent inter-transaction patterns. By using the ITP-tree, the algorithm requires only one database scan and can localize joining, pruning, and support counting to a small number of dat-lists. The experiment results show that the ITP-Miner algorithm outperforms the FITI (First Intra Then Inter) algorithm by one order of magnitude. 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.