On the Complexity of Mining Itemsets from the Crowd Using Taxonomies
Résumé
We study the problem of frequent itemset mining in domains
where data is not recorded in a conventional database but
only exists in human knowledge. We provide examples of
such scenarios, and present a crowdsourcing model for them.
The model uses the crowd as an oracle to find out whether an
itemset is frequent or not, and relies on a known taxonomy
of the item domain to guide the search for frequent itemsets.
In the spirit of data mining with oracles, we analyze the com-
plexity of this problem in terms of (i) crowd complexity, that
measures the number of crowd questions required to iden-
tify the frequent itemsets; and (ii) computational complexity,
that measures the computational effort required to choose the
questions. We provide lower and upper complexity bounds
in terms of the size and structure of the input taxonomy, as
well as the size of a concise description of the output item-
sets. We also provide constructive algorithms that achieve
the upper bounds, and consider more efficient variants for
practical situations.