RDD-Eclat: Approaches to Parallelize Eclat Algorithm on Spark RDD Framework

Abstract

Initially, a number of frequent itemset mining (FIM) algorithms have been designed on the Hadoop MapReduce, a distributed big data processing framework. But, due to heavy disk I/O, MapReduce is found to be inefficient for such highly iterative algorithms. Therefore, Spark, a more efficient distributed data processing framework, has been developed with in-memory computation and resilient distributed dataset (RDD) features to support the iterative algorithms. On the Spark RDD framework, Apriori and FP-Growth based FIM algorithms have been designed, but Eclat-based algorithm has not been explored yet. In this paper, RDD-Eclat, a parallel Eclat algorithm on the Spark RDD framework is proposed with its five variants. The proposed algorithms are evaluated on the various benchmark datasets, which shows that RDD-Eclat outperforms the Spark-based Apriori by many times. Also, the experimental results show the scalability of the proposed algorithms on increasing the number of cores and size of the dataset. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.