apriori: Frequent itemsets via the Apriori algorithm

Apriori function to extract frequent itemsets for association rule mining

from mlxtend.frequent_patterns import apriori

Overview

Apriori is a popular algorithm [1] for extracting frequent itemsets with applications in association rule learning. The apriori algorithm has been designed to operate on databases containing transactions, such as purchases by customers of a store. An itemset is considered as "frequent" if it meets a user-specified support threshold. For instance, if the support threshold is set to 0.5 (50%), a frequent itemset is defined as a set of items that occur together in at least 50% of all transactions in the database.

References

[1] Agrawal, Rakesh, and Ramakrishnan Srikant. "Fast algorithms for mining association rules." Proc. 20th int. conf. very large data bases, VLDB. Vol. 1215. 1994.

Related

• FP-Growth
• FP-Max

Example 1 -- Generating Frequent Itemsets

The apriori function expects data in a one-hot encoded pandas DataFrame. Suppose we have the following transaction data:

dataset = [['Milk', 'Onion', 'Nutmeg', 'Kidney Beans', 'Eggs', 'Yogurt'],
           ['Dill', 'Onion', 'Nutmeg', 'Kidney Beans', 'Eggs', 'Yogurt'],
           ['Milk', 'Apple', 'Kidney Beans', 'Eggs'],
           ['Milk', 'Unicorn', 'Corn', 'Kidney Beans', 'Yogurt'],
           ['Corn', 'Onion', 'Onion', 'Kidney Beans', 'Ice cream', 'Eggs']]

We can transform it into the right format via the TransactionEncoder as follows:

import pandas as pd
from mlxtend.preprocessing import TransactionEncoder

te = TransactionEncoder()
te_ary = te.fit(dataset).transform(dataset)
df = pd.DataFrame(te_ary, columns=te.columns_)
df

Now, let us return the items and itemsets with at least 60% support:

from mlxtend.frequent_patterns import apriori

apriori(df, min_support=0.6)

By default, apriori returns the column indices of the items, which may be useful in downstream operations such as association rule mining. For better readability, we can set use_colnames=True to convert these integer values into the respective item names:

apriori(df, min_support=0.6, use_colnames=True)

Example 2 -- Selecting and Filtering Results

The advantage of working with pandas DataFrames is that we can use its convenient features to filter the results. For instance, let's assume we are only interested in itemsets of length 2 that have a support of at least 80 percent. First, we create the frequent itemsets via apriori and add a new column that stores the length of each itemset:

frequent_itemsets = apriori(df, min_support=0.6, use_colnames=True)
frequent_itemsets['length'] = frequent_itemsets['itemsets'].apply(lambda x: len(x))
frequent_itemsets

Then, we can select the results that satisfy our desired criteria as follows:

frequent_itemsets[ (frequent_itemsets['length'] == 2) &
                   (frequent_itemsets['support'] >= 0.8) ]

Similarly, using the Pandas API, we can select entries based on the "itemsets" column:

frequent_itemsets[ frequent_itemsets['itemsets'] == {'Onion', 'Eggs'} ]

Frozensets

Note that the entries in the "itemsets" column are of type frozenset, which is built-in Python type that is similar to a Python set but immutable, which makes it more efficient for certain query or comparison operations (https://docs.python.org/3.6/library/stdtypes.html#frozenset). Since frozensets are sets, the item order does not matter. I.e., the query

frequent_itemsets[ frequent_itemsets['itemsets'] == {'Onion', 'Eggs'} ]

is equivalent to any of the following three

• frequent_itemsets[ frequent_itemsets['itemsets'] == {'Eggs', 'Onion'} ]
• frequent_itemsets[ frequent_itemsets['itemsets'] == frozenset(('Eggs', 'Onion')) ]
• frequent_itemsets[ frequent_itemsets['itemsets'] == frozenset(('Onion', 'Eggs')) ]

Example 3 -- Working with Sparse Representations

To save memory, you may want to represent your transaction data in the sparse format. This is especially useful if you have lots of products and small transactions.

oht_ary = te.fit(dataset).transform(dataset, sparse=True)
sparse_df = pd.DataFrame.sparse.from_spmatrix(oht_ary, columns=te.columns_)
sparse_df

apriori(sparse_df, min_support=0.6, use_colnames=True, verbose=1)

Processing 21 combinations | Sampling itemset size 3

API

apriori(df, min_support=0.5, use_colnames=False, max_len=None, verbose=0, low_memory=False)

Get frequent itemsets from a one-hot DataFrame

Parameters

• df : pandas DataFrame

  pandas DataFrame the encoded format. Also supports DataFrames with sparse data; for more info, please see (https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/ user_guide/sparse.html#sparse-data-structures)

  Please note that the old pandas SparseDataFrame format is no longer supported in mlxtend >= 0.17.2.

  The allowed values are either 0/1 or True/False. For example,

    Apple  Bananas   Beer  Chicken   Milk   Rice
    0     True    False   True     True  False   True
    1     True    False   True    False  False   True
    2     True    False   True    False  False  False
    3     True     True  False    False  False  False
    4    False    False   True     True   True   True
    5    False    False   True    False   True   True
    6    False    False   True    False   True  False
    7     True     True  False    False  False  False

• min_support : float (default: 0.5)

  A float between 0 and 1 for minumum support of the itemsets returned. The support is computed as the fraction transactions_where_item(s)_occur / total_transactions.

• use_colnames : bool (default: False)

  If True, uses the DataFrames' column names in the returned DataFrame instead of column indices.

• max_len : int (default: None)

  Maximum length of the itemsets generated. If None (default) all possible itemsets lengths (under the apriori condition) are evaluated.

• verbose : int (default: 0)

  Shows the number of iterations if >= 1 and low_memory is True. If

  =1 and low_memory is False, shows the number of combinations.

• low_memory : bool (default: False)

  If True, uses an iterator to search for combinations above min_support. Note that while low_memory=True should only be used for large dataset if memory resources are limited, because this implementation is approx. 3-6x slower than the default.

Returns

pandas DataFrame with columns ['support', 'itemsets'] of all itemsets that are >= min_support and < than max_len (if max_len is not None). Each itemset in the 'itemsets' column is of type frozenset, which is a Python built-in type that behaves similarly to sets except that it is immutable (For more info, see https://docs.python.org/3.6/library/stdtypes.html#frozenset).

Examples

For usage examples, please see https://rasbt.github.io/mlxtend/user_guide/frequent_patterns/apriori/