Association rule mining is a data mining technique which is used to identify decision-making patterns by analyzing datasets. Many association rule mining techniques exist to find various relationships among itemsets. The techniques proposed in the literature are processed using non-distributed platform in which the entire dataset is sustained till all transactions are processed and the transactions are scanned sequentially. They require more space and are time consuming techniques when large amounts of data are considered. An efficient technique is needed to find association rules from big data set to minimize the space as well as time. Thus, this paper aims to enhance the efficiency of association rule mining of big transaction database both in terms of memory and speed by processing the big transaction database as distributed file system in Map-Reduce framework. The proposed method organizes the transactions into clusters and the clusters are distributed among many parallel processors in a distributed platform. This distribution makes the clusters to be processed simultaneously to find itemsets which enhances the performance both in memory and speed. Then, frequent itemsets are discovered using minimum support threshold. Associations are generated from frequent itemsets and finally interesting rules are found using minimum confidence threshold. The efficiency of the proposed method is enhanced in a noticeably higher level both in terms of memory and speed.

Association rule mining aims to determine the relations among sets of items in transaction database and data repositories. It generates informative patterns from large databases. Apriori algorithm is a very popular algorithm in data mining for defining the relationships among itemsets. It generates 1, 2, 3,…, n-item candidate sets. Besides, it performs many scans on transactions to find the frequencies of itemsets which determine 1, 2, 3,…, n-item frequent sets. This paper aims to eradicate the generation of candidate itemsets so as to minimize the processing time, memory and the number of scans on the database. Since only those itemsets which occur in a transaction play a vital role in determining frequent itemset, the methodology that is proposed in this paper is extracting only single itemsets from each transaction, then 2,3,..., n itemsets are generated from them and their corresponding frequencies are also calculated. Further, each transaction is scanned only once and no candidate itemsets is generated both resulting in minimizing the memory space for storing the scanned itemsets and minimizing the processing time too. Based on the generated itemsets, association rules are generated using minimum support and confidence.