A FP-Tree Based Approach for Mining All Strongly Correlated Pairs without Candidate Generation

Abstract

Given a user-specified minimum correlation threshold and a transaction database, the problem of mining all-strong correlated pairs is to find all item pairs with Pearson's correlation coefficients above the threshold . Despite the use of upper bound based pruning technique in the Taper algorithm [1], when the number of items and transactions are very large, candidate pair generation and test is still costly. To avoid the costly test of a large number of candidate pairs, in this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm, called Tcp, based on the well-known FP-tree data structure, for mining the complete set of all-strong correlated item pairs. Our experimental results on both synthetic and real world datasets show that, Tcp's performance is significantly better than that of the previously developed Taper algorithm over practical ranges of correlation threshold specifications.