An efficient and effective algorithm for mining top-rank-k frequent patterns

Frequent pattern mining generates a lot of candidates, which requires a lot of memory usage and mining time. In real applications, a small number of frequent patterns are used. Therefore, the mining of top-rank-k frequent patterns, which limits the number of mined frequent patterns by ranking them in frequency, has received increasing interest. This paper proposes the iNTK algorithm, which is an improved version of the NTK algorithm, for mining top-rank-k frequent patterns. This algorithm employs an N-list structure to represent patterns. The subsume concept is used to speed up the process of mining top-rank-k patterns. The experiments are conducted to evaluate iNTK and NTK in terms of mining time and memory usage for eight datasets. The experimental results show that iNTK is more efficient and faster than NTK.