Parallel BSO Algorithm for Association Rules Mining using Master/Workers Paradigm

Abstract

The extraction of association rules from large transactional databases is considered in the paper using cluster architecture parallel computing. Motivated by both the successful sequential BSO-ARM algorithm, and the strong matching between this algorithm and the structure of the cluster architectures, we present in this paper a new parallel ARM algorithm that we call MW-BSO-ARM for Master/Workers version of BSO-ARM. The goal is to deal with large databases by minimizing the communication and synchronization costs, which represent the main challenges that faces any cluster architecture. The experimental results are very promising and show clear improvement that reaches 300% for large instances. For examples, in big transactional database such as WebDocs, the proposed approach generates 107 satisfied rules in only 22 minutes, while a previous GPU-based approach cannot generate more than 103 satisfied rules into 10 hours. The results also reveal that MWBSO-ARM outperforms the PGARM cluster-based approach in terms of computation time.