Irreducible Frequent Patterns in Transactional Databases

Irreducible frequent patters (IFPs) are introduced for transactional databases. An IFP is such a frequent pattern (FP),(x1,x2,...xn), the probability of which, P(x1,x2,...xn), cannot be represented as a product of the probabilities of two (or more) other FPs of the smaller lengths. We have developed an algorithm for searching IFPs in transactional databases. We argue that IFPs represent useful tools for characterizing the transactional databases and may have important applications to bio-systems including the immune systems and for improving vaccination strategies. The effectiveness of the IFPs approach has been illustrated in application to a classification problem.