Itemsets for Real-Valued Datasets

Pattern mining is one of the most well-studied sub fields in exploratory data analysis. While there is a significant amount of literature on how to discover and rank item sets efficiently from binary data, there is surprisingly little research done in mining patterns from real-valued data. In this paper we propose a family of quality scores for real-valued item sets. We approach the problem by considering casting the dataset into a binary data and computing the support from this data. This naive approach requires us to select thresholds. To remedy this, instead of selecting one set of thresholds, we treat thresholds as random variables and compute the average support. We show that we can compute this support efficiently, and we also introduce two normalisations, namely comparing the support against the independence assumption and, more generally, against the partition assumption. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that we can discover statistically significant patterns efficiently.