Discovering frequent itemsets over transactional data streams through an efficient and stable approximate approach

A data stream is a massive and unbounded sequence of data elements that are continuously generated at a fast speed. Compared with traditional approaches, data mining in data streams is more challenging since several extra requirements need to be satisfied. In this paper, we propose a mining algorithm for finding frequent itemsets over the transactional data stream. Unlike most of existing algorithms, our method works based on the theory of Approximate Inclusion–Exclusion. Without incrementally maintaining the overall synopsis of the stream, we can approximate the itemsets’ counts according to certain kept information and the counts bounding technique. Some additional techniques are designed and integrated into the algorithm for performance improvement. Besides, the performance of the proposed algorithm is tested and analyzed through a series of experiments.