RuleMiner.jl - Data Mining in Julia

About

RuleMiner.jl is a Julia package for data mining inspired by the arules R package and SPMF Java library.

Key features of RuleMiner.jl include:

• Support for Julia's native multithreading capabilities for improved performance
• Direct interfaces with DataFrames.jl for loading transactional data and exporting results
• Flexible handling of either relative (percentage) support or absolute (count) support in minimum support thresholds

Algorithms

The package currently has support for these algorithms:

Association Rule Mining

• A Priori¹

Frequent Itemset Mining

• FP-Growth²
• ECLAT³

Closed Itemset Mining

• FPClose⁴
• CHARM⁵
• LCM⁶
• CARPENTER⁷

Maximal Itemset Mining

• FPMax⁸
• GenMax⁹

Frequent Itemset Recovery

• RecoverClosed¹⁰ (recovery from closed itemsets)
• RecoverMax (recovery from maximal itemsets)

Contributing

Contributions are welcome!

Please open an issue before opening a PR.

Installation

julia> ]

pkg> add RuleMiner

Usage

These examples use the retail dataset from the Frequent Itemset Mining Implementenations (FIMI) repository hosted by the University of Antwerp.

using RuleMiner

Create Txns objects

Load transactions from a file into Txns

data = Txns("retail.txt",' ')

Result:

Txns with 88162 transactions, 16470 items, and 908576 non-zero elements
 Index │ Items                                                                                                                               
───────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
     1 │ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30
     2 │ 31, 32, 33
     3 │ 34, 35, 36
     4 │ 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47
     5 │ 39, 40, 48, 49
     6 │ 39, 40, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59
     ⋮ │ ⋮
 88156 │ 40, 42, 49, 244, 343, 439, 549, 704, 927, 968, 1061, 1281, 1773, 1815, 2013, 2715, 2793, 4593, 4647, 4699, 9151, 12933, 13335, 4894…
 88157 │ 49, 202, 256, 279, 408, 480, 768, 825, 987, 1396, 1599, 2023, 2284, 2376, 6726, 13335, 14007, 14100
 88158 │ 40, 876, 2666, 2963, 12960, 14071, 14407, 15519, 16380
 88159 │ 40, 42, 102, 347, 394, 414, 480, 523, 587, 636, 696, 800, 1467, 1787, 1995, 2450, 2831, 3036, 3592, 3723, 6218, 11494, 12130, 13034
 88160 │ 2311, 4268
 88161 │ 40, 49, 2529
 88162 │ 33, 40, 206, 243, 1394

Or alternatively convert an existing 1-hot encoded DataFrame.

data = Txns(df)

Mine patterns from Txns objects

Generate association rules using A Priori with 10% minimum support, any confidence, and a max rule length of 3.

arules = apriori(data, 0.1, 0.0, 3)

Result:

13×8 DataFrame
 Row │ LHS       RHS     Support   Confidence  Coverage  Lift     N      Length 
     │ Array…    String  Float64   Float64     Float64   Float64  Int64  Int64  
─────┼──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
   1 │ String[]  33      0.172036    0.172036  1.0       1.0      15167       1
   2 │ String[]  39      0.176902    0.176902  1.0       1.0      15596       1
   3 │ String[]  40      0.574794    0.574794  1.0       1.0      50675       1
   4 │ String[]  42      0.169517    0.169517  1.0       1.0      14945       1
   5 │ String[]  49      0.477927    0.477927  1.0       1.0      42135       1
   6 │ ["42"]    40      0.129466    0.763734  0.169517  1.32871  11414       2
   7 │ ["40"]    42      0.129466    0.225239  0.574794  1.32871  11414       2
   8 │ ["40"]    39      0.117341    0.204144  0.574794  1.154    10345       2
   9 │ ["39"]    40      0.117341    0.663311  0.176902  1.154    10345       2
  10 │ ["40"]    49      0.330551    0.575076  0.574794  1.20327  29142       2
  11 │ ["42"]    49      0.102289    0.603413  0.169517  1.26256   9018       2
  12 │ ["49"]    40      0.330551    0.691634  0.477927  1.20327  29142       2
  13 │ ["49"]    42      0.102289    0.214026  0.477927  1.26256   9018       2

Generate frequent itemsets with a minimum support of 5,000 transactions using ECLAT

itemsets = eclat(data, 5_000)

Result:

15×4 DataFrame
 Row │ Itemset             Support    N      Length 
     │ Array…              Float64    Int64  Int64  
─────┼──────────────────────────────────────────────
   1 │ ["42"]              0.169517   14945       1
   2 │ ["33"]              0.172036   15167       1
   3 │ ["39"]              0.176902   15596       1
   4 │ ["49"]              0.477927   42135       1
   5 │ ["40"]              0.574794   50675       1
   6 │ ["39", "49"]        0.0901068   7944       2
   7 │ ["49", "40"]        0.330551   29142       2
   8 │ ["39", "49", "40"]  0.0692135   6102       3
   9 │ ["39", "40"]        0.117341   10345       2
  10 │ ["42", "49"]        0.102289    9018       2
  11 │ ["42", "49", "40"]  0.0835507   7366       3
  12 │ ["42", "40"]        0.129466   11414       2
  13 │ ["33", "49"]        0.0911277   8034       2
  14 │ ["33", "49", "40"]  0.0612736   5402       3
  15 │ ["33", "40"]        0.095903    8455       2

Multithreading

RuleMiner.jl makes use of Julia's native multithreading support for significant performance gains. Enabling multithreading is done by using the -t flag when launching Julia and either specifying the number of threads or passing in the auto argument to launch julia with all available threads.

$ julia -t auto

Once Julia is launched, you can can view the enabled threads with nthreads() from the Base.Threads module.

julia> using Base.Threads

julia> nthreads()

See this post for more info on multithreading in Julia.

Tip

Multithreading can be configured for the VScode integrated terminal by setting the julia.NumThreads parameter in VScode settings.

Future Work

Future versions will support sequential mining algorithms and high-utility mining algorithms.

References

Footnotes

1. Agrawal, Rakesh, and Ramakrishnan Srikant. “Fast Algorithms for Mining Association Rules in Large Databases.” In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, 487–99. VLDB ’94. San Francisco, CA, USA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., 1994. ↩

2. Han, Jiawei, Jian Pei, and Yiwen Yin. “Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation.” SIGMOD Rec. 29, no. 2 (May 16, 2000): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1145/335191.335372. ↩

3. Zaki, Mohammed. “Scalable Algorithms for Association Mining.” Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions On 12 (June 1, 2000): 372–90. https://doi.org/10.1109/69.846291. ↩

4. Grahne, Gösta, and Jianfei Zhu. “Fast Algorithms for Frequent Itemset Mining Using FP-Trees.” IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 17, no. 10 (October 2005): 1347–62. https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2005.166. ↩

5. Zaki, Mohammed, and Ching-Jui Hsiao. “CHARM: An Efficient Algorithm for Closed Itemset Mining.” In Proceedings of the 2002 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM), 457–73. Proceedings. Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, 2002. https://doi.org/10.1137/1.9781611972726.27. ↩

6. Uno, Takeaki, Tatsuya Asai, Yuzo Uchida, and Hiroki Arimura. “An Efficient Algorithm for Enumerating Closed Patterns in Transaction Databases.” In Discovery Science, edited by Einoshin Suzuki and Setsuo Arikawa, 16–31. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2004. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30214-8_2. ↩

7. Pan, Feng, Gao Cong, Anthony K. H. Tung, Jiong Yang, and Mohammed J. Zaki. “Carpenter: Finding Closed Patterns in Long Biological Datasets.” In Proceedings of the Ninth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 637–42. KDD ’03. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2003. https://doi.org/10.1145/956750.956832. ↩

8. Grahne and Zhu, “Fast Algorithms for Frequent Itemset Mining Using FP-Trees.” ↩

9. Gouda, Karam, and Mohammed J. Zaki. “GenMax: An Efficient Algorithm for Mining Maximal Frequent Itemsets.” Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery 11, no. 3 (November 1, 2005): 223–42. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10618-005-0002-x. ↩

10. Pasquier, Nicolas, Yves Bastide, Rafik Taouil, and Lotfi Lakhal. “Efficient Mining of Association Rules Using Closed Itemset Lattices.” Information Systems 24, no. 1 (March 1, 1999): 25–46. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0306-4379(99)00003-4. ↩