International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology (IJETT) – Volume 20 Number 4 – Feb 2015
Predicting Missing Items in a Shopping Cart using Apriori Algorithm
Nilesha Dalvi#1, Vinit Erangale#2, Amol Chavhan#3, Asst. Prof.Alka Srivastava#4
Department of Computer Engineering, Atharva College of Engineering, Marve Rd, Malad (west), Mumbai-95, Maharashtra,
India
Abstract— In today’s ever growing market it is very essential to
keep track of the customer’s interests and keep them updated
about the trends and products in the market. In this project we
aim to create a shopping portal and have a database that records
the item sets that are frequently bought together using
‘APRIORI ALGORITHM’ This information will be used to flash
advertisements and offers on the products of their interests. Also
to promote new products relating to their requirements and
mainly to suggest and prompt them about the products which are
often bought along with the product already present in their
shopping cart. The frequently co-occurring group of items is
determined by frequent pattern mining in the databases. Here
the major contributing task is [2] expediting the frequent item
sets by proposing a technique that uses the minimal data
available in the shopping cart for the prediction of what other
items the customer can choose to buy.
Keywords— Apriori Algorithm, Association rule mining, Data
mining
I. INTRODUCTION
A. Data Mining
Data mining is the essential process of discovering hidden
and interesting patterns from massive amount of data where
data is stored in data warehouse [4]. It analyses data from [3]
different perspectives and summarizes it into [3] useful
information -information that can be used to increase revenue,
cuts costs, or both. It’s a [1] powerful new technology with
great potential to help companies focus on the most important
information in their data warehouses. Data mining tools
predict future trends and behaviours, allowing businesses to
make proactive, knowledge-driven decisions. This task is [2]
computationally expensive, especially when a large number of
patterns exist. This large number of patterns which are mined
during the various approaches makes it difficult for the user to
identify the patterns which are very interesting. Data mining
can be regarded as an algorithmic process that takes data as
input and yields patterns, such as classification rules, itemsets,
association rules, or summaries, as output. This data may
reach to more than terabytes [4].
Data mining is also called (KDD) knowledge discovery in
databases [4],[7], and it includes an integration of techniques
from many disciplines such as statistics, neural networks,
database technology, machine learning and information
retrieval, etc [4],[9]. Interesting patterns are extracted at
reasonable time by KDD’s techniques [4],[6]. KDD process
has several steps, which are performed to extract patterns to
user, such as data cleaning, data selection, data transformation,
data pre-processing, data mining and pattern evaluation [4],[8]
ISSN: 2231-5381 http://www.ijettjournal.org
B. Association Rule Mining
The association rule mining (ARM) is very important task
within the area of data mining [2]. It is perhaps the most
common form of local-pattern discovery in unsupervised
learning systems [7].
Association rules are statements of the form {X1, X2, …, Xn}
=> Y meaning that if all of X1, X2,… Xn is found in the
market basket, and then we have good chance of finding Y.
The probability of finding Y for us to accept this rule is called
the confidence of the rule. Normally rules that have a
confidence above a certain threshold only will be searched. In
many situations, association rules involves sets of items that
appear frequently [1]. The technique is likely to be very
practical in applications which use the similarity in customer
buying behaviour in order to make peer recommendations [7].
It is intended to identify strong rules discovered in databases
using different measures of interestingness [3].
II. IMPLEMENTATION
A. Apriori Algorithm
Apriori algorithm (Agrawal et al. 1993) is easy to execute
and very simple, is used to mine all frequent item sets in
database [4]. In the process of Apriori, the following
definitions are needed [4]:
Definition 1: Suppose T={T1, T2, … , Tm},(m_1) is a set of
transactions, Ti= {I1, I2, … , In},(n_1) is the set of items, and
k-itemset = {i1, i2, … , ik},(k_1) is also the set of k items, and
k-itemset⊆ I
Definition 2: Suppose _ (itemset), is the support count of
itemset or the frequency of occurrence of an itemset in
transactions.
Definition 3: Suppose Ck is the candidate itemset of size k,
and Lk is the frequent itemset of size k.
The key idea of Apriori algorithm is to make multiple
passes over the database. It employs an iterative approach
known as a breadth-first search (level-wise search) through
the search space, where k-itemsets are used to explore (k+1)-
itemsets [7].
It is used to generate all frequent itemset (i.e an itemset [7]
whose support is greater than some user-specified minimum
support denoted Lk, where k is the size of the itemset). A
Candidate itemset is [7] a potentially frequent itemset
(denoted Ck, where k is the size of the itemset).
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 International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology (IJETT) – Volume 20 Number 4 – Feb 2015
1. Pass 1
1. Generate the candidate itemsets in C1
2. Save the frequent itemsets in L1
2. Pass k
(i). Generate the candidate itemsets in Ck from the
frequent itemsets in Lk-1
Join Lk-1p with Lk-1q, as follows: insert nto Ck select
p.item1, p.item2, . . . , p.itemk-1, q.itemk-1 from Lk-1p,
Lk-1q where, p.item1 = q.item1, . . . p.itemk-2 = q.itemk-2,
p.itemk-1<q. itemk-1
of C3 and use L1 to get the transaction IDs of the minimum
support count between x, y and z, then scan for C3 only in
these specific transactions and repeat these steps until no new
frequent itemsets are identified [4], [9] The process is
illustrated in the Fig. 1.
Scan all transactions to generate L1 table
L1 (items, their support, their transaction
IDs
Construct Ck by self-join

• Generate all (k-1)-subsets from the candidate itemsets in

Ck
• Prune all candidate itemsets from Ck where, some (k-1)- Use L1 to identify the target transactions for Ck
subset of the candidate itemset is not in the frequent
itemset Lk-1
(ii). Scan the transaction database to determine the support
Scan the target transactions to generate Ck
for each candidate itemset in Ck
(iii). Save the frequent itemsets in Lk [7].
Fig. 1 Steps for Ck generation [4]
B. Limitations
The improvement of algorithm can be described as follows
Apriori algorithm too shows some loopholes in spite of
[4]:
being simple and clear. The main limitation is excessive
//Generate items, items support, their transaction ID
wastage of time to hold a huge number of candidate sets with
(1) L1 = find_frequent_1_itemsets (T);
[4] much frequent itemsets, low minimum support or large
(2) For (k = 2; Lk-1 __; k++) {
itemsets. For example, if there are104 frequent 1-item sets, the
//Generate the Ck from the LK-1
Apriori algorithm will need to generate more than 107 length-
(3) Ck = candidates generated from Lk-1;
2 candidates and accumulate and test their occurrence
//get the item Iw with minimum support in Ck using L1,
frequencies [7]. Furthermore, to detect frequent pattern in size
(1_w_k).
100 (e.g.) v1, v2…v100, it will be required to generate 2100
(4) x = Get _item_min_sup(Ck, L1);
candidate item sets that yield on costly and wasting of time of
// get the target transaction IDs that contain item x.
candidate generation [7], no matter what implementation
(5) Tgt = get_Transaction_ID(x);
technique is applied [4]. Thus from candidate itemsets, it will
(6) For each transaction t in Tgt Do
check for multiple sets and also [4] scan database many times
(7) Increment the count of all items in Ck that are found in Tgt;
repeatedly for finding candidate itemsets. , When the database
(8) Lk= items in Ck _ min_support;
is storing a large number of data services, the limited memory
(9) End;
capacity, the system I/O load, considerably very long time
(10)}
will be consumed in scanning the database, so efficiency is
very low[7].
III. CONCLUSION
C. Improvements
Thus, using Apriori Algorithm with improvements, we are
Improved apriori algorithm [4] firstly scans all transactions
aiming at achieving successful predictions for an online
to generate L1 which contains the items, their support count
shopping cart.
and Transaction ID where the items are found. And then use
L1 later as a reference to generate L2, L3 ... Lk. When C2 is
to be generated, it makes a self-join L1 * L1 to construct 2-
REFERENCES
itemset C (x, y), where x and y are the items of C2. Before
[1] Venkateswara, Sri. "Predicting Missing Items in Shopping Carts using
scanning all transaction records to count the support count of
Fast Algorithm." (2011)
each candidate, use L1 to get the transaction IDs of the [2] Nirmala, M., and V. Palanisamy. "An Enhanced Prediction Technique
minimum support count between x and y, and thus scan for C2 for Missing Itemset in."
only in these specific transactions. The same thing for C3, [3] Nirmala, M., and V. Palanisamy. "An Enhanced Prediction Technique
for Missing Itemset in."
construct 3-itemset C (x, y, z), where x, y and z are the items

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 International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology (IJETT) – Volume 20 Number 4 – Feb 2015
Kollipara Anuradha, K. Anand Kumar "An E-Commerce application
for Presuming Missing Items"International Journal of Computer
Trends and Technology (IJCTT),V4(8):2636-2640 August Issue
2013 .ISSN 2231-2803.www.ijcttjournal.org. Published by Seventh
Sense Research Group
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