What is Itemset

As new forms of information science and technology, big data analysis and mining aims to discover implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful information and knowledge from big databases that contain high volumes of valuable veracious data collected or generated at a high velocity from a wide variety of data sources. Among different big data mining tasks, this chapter focuses on big data analysis and mining for frequent patterns. By relying on the MapReduce programming model, researchers only need to specify the “map” and “reduce” functions to discover frequent patterns from (1) big databases of precise data in a breadth-first manner or in a depth-first manner and/or from (2) big databases of uncertain data. Such a big data analysis and mining process can be sped up. The resulting (constrained or unconstrained) frequent patterns mined from big databases provide users with new insights and a sound understanding of users' patterns. Such knowledge is useful is many real-life information science and technology applications.