Apriori is a seminal algorithm for fi nding frequent itemsets using candidate generation

[1]. It is characterized as a level-wise complete search algorithm using anti-monotonicity of

itemsets, “if an itemset is not frequent, any of its superset is never frequent”. By convention,

Apriori assumes that items within a transaction or itemset are sorted in lexicographic order.

Let the set of frequent itemsets of size k be Fk and their candidates be Ck . Apriori fi rst scans

the database and searches for frequent itemsets of size 1 by accumulating the count for each

item and collecting those that satisfy the minimum support requirement. It then iterates on

the following three steps and extracts all the frequent itemsets.-Apriori is a seminal algorithm for