Stable High Utility Itemset Mining

High Utility Itemset Mining (HUIM) aims at finding all sets of items that have high importance in a database, as measured by a utility function. Although HUIM has many applications, a key limitation is that the discovered patterns often have an unstable utility over time. For example, while a set of products may yield a high utility (profit) over a year, that utility may fluctuate from weeks to weeks. To discover patterns that have a stable utility and hence that are more suitable for decision-making, this paper redefines HUIM as the task of discovering Stable High Utility Itemsets (StableHUI). An efficient tree-based and pattern-growth algorithm named Stable-Growth is proposed to extract all the StableHUI. Several experiments on two real-world datasets and two synthetic datasets show that Stable-Growth is up to 60% faster than a baseline and that it can filter out numerous unstable HUI.