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README.md

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Overview

This package includes ALICE, a suite of three Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo algorithms for sampling datasets from our novel null model, based on a carefully defined set of states and efficient operations to move between them. This null model preserves the Bipartite Joint Degree Matrix of the bipartite (multi)graph corresponding to the (sequence) dataset, which ensures that the number of caterpillars, i.e., paths of length three, is preserved, in addition to the item supports and the transaction lengths.

ALICE-A is based on Restricted Swap Operations (RSOs) on biadjacency matrices, which preserve the BJDM. ALICE-B adapts the CURVEBALL approach [1] to RSOs, to essentially perform multiple RSOs at every step, thus leading to faster mixing. ALICE-S is based on multi-graph Restricted Swap Operations (mRSOs) on bipartite multi-graphs, which preserve the BJDM of the multi-graph.

The package includes a Jupyter Notebook (Results.ipynb) with the complete experimental evaluation of ALICE. A selected subset of these results have been included in our conference paper, accepted for publication at the ICDM'22 conference.

Content of Code

datasets/ .....
helpers/ ......
notebooks/ ....
output/ .......
scripts/ ......
src/ ..........

The folder helpers includes the scripts used to process the output of ALICE (folder output) and produce the statistics presented in the charts in the Jupyter Notebook Results.ipynb in the folder notebooks. This folder includes also the Jupyter Notebook used to generate some of the dataset input files (DB_Generation.ipynb).

Requirements

To run our code (the source files are in folder src):

Java JRE v1.8.0

To check the results of our experimental evaluation:

Jupyter Notebook

Input Format

The input file for transactional databases must be a space separated list of integers, where each integer represents an item and each line represents a transaction in the database. The input file for sequence databases must be a space separated list of integers formatted as follows:

it1 it2 -1 it3 -1 it4 it5 -1 -2

Each line represents a sequence in the database, and each itemset in the sequence is separated by the -1 symbol. The end of the line is marked by a -2. Each it is an item.

The script run.sh assumes that the file extension is .txt. The folder datasets includes all the datasets used in our experimental evaluation of ALICE. Sequence datasets are in the folder datasets/sequential.

Usage

You can use ALICE-A and ALICE-B by running the script run.sh included in this package (folder scripts). The value of each parameter used by ALICE must be set in the configuration file config.cfg (folder scripts). You can use ALICE-S by running the script run_seq.sh in the folder scripts. The parameters used by the algorithm must be set in the configuration file config_seq.cfg.

General Settings

  • datasetsDir: path to the folder containing the dataset files.
  • resultsDir: path to the folder to store the results.
  • seed: seed for reproducibility.
  • numThreads: number of threads.
  • maxNumSwapsFactor: integer used in the Convergence experiment.
  • numSwaps: number of iterations (used in the Scalability experiment).
  • cleanup: whether to delete the samples and frequent itemsets found during the experiments.
  • fwer: family wise error rate (used in the SigFreqItemsets experiment).
  • numWySamples: number of samples to compute the adjusted critical value (used in the SigFreqItemsets experiment).
  • numEstSamples: samples to compute the p-value (used in the SigFreqItemsets experiment).

Dataset-related Settings

  • Dataset names: names of the dataset files (without file extension).
  • Default values: comma-separated list of default values for each dataset, i.e., number of swaps/iterations to perform before returning the random sample, number of random samples to generate, and minimum frequency for an itemset to be frequent (value used in the NumFreqItemset experiment).
  • Experimental flags: test to perform among (1) significant itemset mining (SigFreqItemsets.java), (2) convergence (Convergence.java), (3) scalability (Scalability.java), and (4) number of frequent itemsets by size (NumFreqItemsets.java). Then, the arrays that store the names, the default values, and the experimental flags of each dataset to test must be declared at the beginning of the script run.sh (run_seq.sh respectively).

License

This package is released under the GNU General Public License.

References

[1] N. D. Verhelst, “An efficient MCMC algorithm to sample binary matrices with fixed marginals,” Psychometrika, vol. 73, no. 4, pp. 705–728, 2008.