A MapReduce solution for associative classification of big data

Associative classifiers have proven to be very effective in classification problems. Unfortunately, the algorithms used for learning these classifiers are not able to adequately manage big data because of time complexity and memory constraints. To overcome such drawbacks, we propose a distributed association rule-based classification scheme shaped according to the MapReduce programming model. The scheme mines classification association rules (CARs) using a properly enhanced, distributed version of the well-known FP-Growth algorithm. Once CARs have been mined, the proposed scheme performs a distributed rule pruning. The set of survived CARs is used to classify unlabeled patterns. The memory usage and time complexity for each phase of the learning process are discussed, and the scheme is evaluated on seven real-world big datasets on the Hadoop framework, characterizing its scalability and achievable speedup on small computer clusters. The proposed solution for associative classifiers turns to be suitable to practically address big datasets even with modest hardware support. Comparisons with two state-of-the-art distributed learning algorithms are also discussed in terms of accuracy, model complexity, and computation time.