Discovery of High Utility Itemsets Using a Artificial Ant Colony Algorithm with the HUIM-ACO algorithm (SPMF documentation)

This example explains how to run the HUIM-ACO algorithm using the SPMF open-source data mining library.

How to run this example?

• If you are using the graphical interface, (1) choose the "HUIM-ACO" algorithm, (2) select the input file "contextHUIM.txt", (3) set the output file name (e.g. "output.txt"), (4) set the minutil parameter to 40, set the optional "BucketNum" parameter to 2 and (5) click "Run algorithm".
• If you want to execute this example from the command line, then execute this command:
  java -jar spmf.jar run HUIM-ACO contextHUIM.txt output.txt 40 2
  in a folder containing spmf.jar and the example input contextHUIM.txt.
• If you are using the source code version of SPMF, launch the file "MainTestHUIM_ACO.java" in the package ca.pfv.SPMF.tests.

What is HUIM-ACO?

HUIM-ACO is an algorithm for discovering high utility itemsets (HUIs) which have utility value no less than the minimum utility threshold in a transaction database. The HUIM-ACO algorithm discovers HUIs using a artificial ant colony optimization algorithm (ACO). It was proposed by Wei Song et al. at FSKD 2020

 What is the input?

HUIM-ACO takes as input a transaction database with utility information. Let's consider the following database consisting of 7 transactions (t1,t2, ..., t7) and 5 items (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). This database is provided in the text file "contextHUIM.txt" in the package ca.pfv.spmf.tests of the SPMF distribution.

Each line of the database is:

• a set of items (the first column of the table),
• the sum of the utilities (e.g. profit) of these items in this transaction (the second column of the table),
• the utility of each item for this transaction (e.g. profit generated by this item for this transaction)(the third column of the table).

Note that the value in the second column for each line is the sum of the values in the third column.
What are real-life examples of such a database? There are several applications in real life. One application is a customer transaction database. Imagine that each transaction represents the items purchased by a customer. The first customer named "t1" bought items 2, 3 and 4. The amount of money spent for each item is respectively 2 $, 2 $ and 5 $. The total amount of money spent in this transaction is 2 + 2 + 5 = 9 $.

What is the output?

The output of HUIM-ACO is the set of high utility itemsets. An itemset X in a database D is a high-utility itemset (HUI) if and only if its utility is no less than the minimum utility threshold. For example, if we run HUIM-ACO and set the minimum utility threshold to 40, we may obtain 2 high utility itemsets.

Input file format

The input file format of high utility itemsets is defined as follows. It is a text file. Each lines represents a transaction. Each line is composed of three sections, as follows.

• First, the items contained in the transaction are listed. An item is represented by a positive integer. Each item is separated from the next item by a single space. It is assumed that all items within a same transaction (line) are sorted according to a total order (e.g. ascending order) and that no item can appear twice within the same transaction.
• Second, the symbol ":" appears and is followed by the transaction utility (an integer).
• Third, the symbol ":" appears and is followed by the utility of each item in this transaction (an integer), separated by single spaces.

For example, for the previous example, the input file is defined as follows:
2 3 4:9:2 2 5
1 2 3 4 5:18:4 2 3 5 4
1 3 4:11:4 2 5
3 4 5:11:2 5 4
1 2 4 5:22:5 4 5 8
1 2 3 4:17:3 8 1 5
4 5:9:5 4

Consider the first line. It means that the transaction {2, 3, 4} has a total utility of 9 and that items 2, 3 and 4 respectively have a utility of 2, 2 and 5 in this transaction. The following lines follow the same format.

Output file format

The output file format of high utility itemsets is defined as follows. It is a text file, each following line represents a high utility itemset. On each line, the items of the itemset are first listed. Each item is represented by an integer, followed by a single space. After, all the items, the keyword " #UTILITY: " appears and is followed by the utility of the itemset. For example, we show below an output file that may be obtained for this example.
4 5 #UTIL: 40
1 2 4 #UTIL: 41

For example, the first line indicates that the itemset {4, 5} is a high utility itemset which has utility equals to 41. The following lines follows the same format.

Implementation details

This is the original implementaiton of HUIM-ACO. Note may not exactly the same as the input format described in the original article. But it is equivalent.

Where can I get more information about the HUIM-ACO algorithm?

This is the reference of the article describing the HUIM-ACO algorithm:

Song, W., Nan, J. (2020) Mining High Utility Itemsets Using Ant Colony Optimization. Proc. of ICNC-FSKD 2020..

Besides, for a general overview of high utility itemset mining, you may read this survey paper.