# MLlib - Frequent Pattern Mining

Mining frequent items, itemsets, subsequences, or other substructures is usually among the first steps to analyze a large-scale dataset, which has been an active research topic in data mining for years. We refer users to Wikipedia’s association rule learning for more information. MLlib provides a parallel implementation of FP-growth, a popular algorithm to mining frequent itemsets.

## FP-growth

The FP-growth algorithm is described in the paper Han et al., Mining frequent patterns without candidate generation, where “FP” stands for frequent pattern. Given a dataset of transactions, the first step of FP-growth is to calculate item frequencies and identify frequent items. Different from Apriori-like algorithms designed for the same purpose, the second step of FP-growth uses a suffix tree (FP-tree) structure to encode transactions without generating candidate sets explicitly, which are usually expensive to generate. After the second step, the frequent itemsets can be extracted from the FP-tree. In MLlib, we implemented a parallel version of FP-growth called PFP, as described in Li et al., PFP: Parallel FP-growth for query recommendation. PFP distributes the work of growing FP-trees based on the suffices of transactions, and hence more scalable than a single-machine implementation. We refer users to the papers for more details.

MLlib’s FP-growth implementation takes the following (hyper-)parameters:

• minSupport: the minimum support for an itemset to be identified as frequent. For example, if an item appears 3 out of 5 transactions, it has a support of 3/5=0.6.
• numPartitions: the number of partitions used to distribute the work.

Examples

FPGrowth implements the FP-growth algorithm. It take a JavaRDD of transactions, where each transaction is an Iterable of items of a generic type. Calling FPGrowth.run with transactions returns an FPGrowthModel that stores the frequent itemsets with their frequencies.

import org.apache.spark.rdd.RDD
import org.apache.spark.mllib.fpm.{FPGrowth, FPGrowthModel}

val transactions: RDD[Array[String]] = ...

val fpg = new FPGrowth()
.setMinSupport(0.2)
.setNumPartitions(10)
val model = fpg.run(transactions)

model.freqItemsets.collect().foreach { itemset =>
println(itemset.items.mkString("[", ",", "]") + ", " + itemset.freq)
}

FPGrowth implements the FP-growth algorithm. It take an RDD of transactions, where each transaction is an Array of items of a generic type. Calling FPGrowth.run with transactions returns an FPGrowthModel that stores the frequent itemsets with their frequencies.

import java.util.List;

import org.apache.spark.api.java.JavaRDD;
import org.apache.spark.mllib.fpm.FPGrowth;
import org.apache.spark.mllib.fpm.FPGrowthModel;

JavaRDD<List<String>> transactions = ...

FPGrowth fpg = new FPGrowth()
.setMinSupport(0.2)
.setNumPartitions(10);
FPGrowthModel<String> model = fpg.run(transactions);

for (FPGrowth.FreqItemset<String> itemset: model.freqItemsets().toJavaRDD().collect()) {
System.out.println("[" + Joiner.on(",").join(s.javaItems()) + "], " + s.freq());
}