In this work we study the mining of top-K frequent closed itemsets, a recently proposed variant of the classical problem of mining frequent closed itemsets where the
support threshold is chosen as the maximum value sufficient to guarantee that the itemsets returned in output be at least
K. We discuss the effectiveness of parameter K in controlling the output size and develop an efficient algorithm for mining top-K frequent closed itemsets in order of decreasing support, which exhibits consistently better performance than the best previously
known one, attaining substantial improvements in some cases. A distinctive feature of our algorithm is that it allows the
user to dynamically raise the value K with no need to restart the computation from scratch.
This work was supported in part by MIUR of Italy under project MAINSTREAM, and by the EU under the EU/IST Project 15964 AEOLUS.