Cartesian Contour: A Concise Representation for a Collection of Frequent Sets

In this paper, the authors consider a novel scheme referred to as Cartesian contour to concisely represent the collection of frequent itemsets. Different from the existing works, this scheme provides a complete view of these itemsets by covering the entire collection of them. More interestingly, it takes a first step in deriving a generative view of the frequent pattern formulation, i.e., how a small number of patterns interact with each other and produce the complexity of frequent itemsets. They perform a theoretical investigation of the concise representation problem and link it to the biclique set cover problem and prove its NP-hardness.