Pre-processing for Constrained Pattern Mining

Constraint pushing techniques have been proven to be effective in reducing the search space in the frequent pattern mining task, and thus in improving efficiency. But while pushing anti-monotone constraints in a level-wise computation of frequent itemsets has been recognized to be always profitable, the case is different for monotonic constraints. In fact, monotone constraints have been considered harder to push in the computation and less effective in pruning the search space. In this paper, we show that this prejudice is ill-founded and introduce ExAnte, a preprocessing data reduction algorithm which reduces dramatically both the search space and the input dataset in constrained frequent pattern mining. Experimental results show a reduction of orders of magnitude, thus enabling a much easier mining task. ExAnte can be used as a mining preprocessor with any constraint pattern mining algorithm.