High-utility itemset mining (HUIM) in transaction databases has been extensively studied to discover interesting itemsets from users' purchase behaviors. With this, business managers can adjust their sale strategies appropriately to increase profit. HUIM approaches usually focus on the utility values of itemsets, but rarely evaluate the correlation of items in itemsets. Many high-utility itemsets are weakly correlated and have no real meaning. To address this issue, we suggest an algorithm, called CoHUI-Miner, to efficiently find correlated high-utility itemsets. In the proposed algorithm, we use the database projection mechanism to reduce the database size and present a new concept, called the prefix utility of projected transactions, to eliminate itemsets which do not satisfy the minimum threshold in the mining process. Experimental evaluation on two types of datasets from sparse to dense ones shows that CoHUI-Miner can efficiently mine correlated high-utility itemsets with regard to both execution time and memory usage. INDEX TERMS Correlated high-utility itemset, data mining, high-utility pattern, projected database.

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