FPGA-Based Stream Processing for Frequent Itemset Mining with Incremental Multiple Hashes

Abstract

With the advent of the IoT era, the amount of real-time data that is processed in data centers has increased explosively. As a result, stream mining, extracting useful knowledge from a huge amount of data in real time, is attracting more and more attention. It is said, however, that real- time stream processing will become more difficult in the near future, because the performance of processing applications continues to increase at a rate of 10% - 15% each year, while the amount of data to be processed is increasing exponentially. In this study, we focused on identifying a promising stream mining algorithm, specifically a Frequent Itemset Mining (FIsM) algorithm, then we improved its performance using an FPGA. FIsM algorithms are important and are basic data- mining techniques used to discover association rules from transactional databases. We improved on an approximate FIsM algorithm proposed recently so that it would fit onto hardware architecture efficiently. We then ran experiments on an FPGA. As a result, we have been able to achieve a speed 400% faster than the original algorithm implemented on a CPU. Moreover, our FPGA prototype showed a 20 times speed improvement compared to the CPU version.