Mining free itemsets under constraints

Computing frequent itemsets and their frequencies from large boolean matrices (e.g., to derive association rules) has been one of the hot topics in data mining. Levelwise algorithms (e.g., the APRIORI algorithm) have been proved effective for frequent itemset mining from sparse data. However, in many practical applications, the computation turns to be intractable for the user-given frequency threshold and the lack of focus leads to huge collections of frequent itemsets. The last three years, two promising issues have been investigated. the use of user defined constraints and closed sets mining. To the best of our knowledge, combining these two frameworks has not been studied yet. In this paper we show that the benefit of these two approaches can be combined into levelwise algorithms. An experimental validation related to the discovery of association rules with negations is reported.