Characterizing Transactional Databases for Frequent Itemset Mining

This paper presents a study of the characteristics of transactional databases used in frequent itemset mining. Such characterizations have typically been used to benchmark and understand the data mining algorithms working on these databases. The aim of our study is to give a picture of how diverse and representative these benchmarking databases are, both in general but also in the context of particular empirical studies found in the literature. Our proposed list of metrics contains many of the existing metrics found in the literature, as well as new ones. Our study shows that our list of metrics is able to capture much of the datasets' inner complexity and thus provides a good basis for the characterization of transactional datasets. Finally, we provide a set of representative datasets based on our characterization that may be used as a benchmark safely.

Synthetic Dataset Generation with Itemset-Based Generative Models

This paper proposes three different data generators, tailored to transactional datasets, based on existing itemset-based generative models. All these generators are intuitive and easy to implement and show satisfactory performance. The quality of each generator is assessed by means of three different methods that capture how well the original dataset structure is preserved.