FP-Growth - find ALL patterns containing a specific item(s) only

Question

The FP-Growth Mining Algorithm finds frequent itemsets i.e. it does not search for patterns by item. If I want to find ALL frequent itemsets for an item, I can use the nodelink property to traverse all paths in the fp-tree for that item, which means I have to traverse all paths for all children of that item.

In the worst case this effectively means I have to run the mining algorithm on the entire fp-tree (and then filter the results for the specific item I'm looking for). This seems like an expensive operation to perform repeatedly, as I'm only looking for a small subset of results. Is there any other mechanism that would allow me to mine patterns selectively?

_{1) Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation; Jiawei Han, Jian Pei, and Yiwen Yin}

Answer 1

It sounds like you need a second data structure like an index. An index tracks important metadata information about the data.

Graphs are typically not structured for fast querying. Indexes can be structured for fast querying.