High-Utility Itemset Mining (HUIM) is designed to discover sets of itemsets that can bring high profits from the database. However, HUIM encounters several challenges in picking a suitable minimum utility threshold for each database. A class of algorithms that select the top-k itemsets based on their utility has been proposed to address this issue. Although traditional top-k HUI mining algorithms do not require a specific threshold, they tend to be very time-consuming and memory-intensive when dealing with large datasets. To tackle the combinational complexity involved in HUIM algorithms, nature-inspired methods have been suggested and adopted. Nonetheless, these algorithms have traditionally focused on handling conventional, often overlooking critical data structures like product hierarchies. Consequently, they fail to extract crucial insight from this novel database format. Thus, our research introduces a heuristic-based algorithm designed to leverage top-k itemsets from databases enriched with item taxonomy data. We propose a technique involving the early pruning of unpromising items to enhance mining efficiency. Experimental evaluations are conducted on several datasets to assess the method’s performance, both with and without adopting this strategy, demonstrating its effectiveness.

High utility itemset mining (HUIM) is one of the most compelling problems in data mining, extending frequent itemset mining (FIM) and serving as a crucial method for analyzing customer behavior. Many HUIM algorithms have been proposed to improve execution time and memory consumption. However, most assume that the profit is fixed for each item in a database, which is unrealistic. Some algorithms address products with unstable transaction profits but still need to run faster due to ineffective pruning strategies. Additionally, generalizing items into categories is often neglected. To address these issues, this paper considers a more practical database type that integrates unstable profits with a taxonomy of items. The proposed algorithm, CLHUN (Cross-level High Utility Itemset Mining in a Database with Unstable and Negative Profits), combines efficient techniques such as item sorting and tighter upper bounds to prune the search space. Furthermore, it introduces strategies to eliminate unpromising items during mining and reduce the number of transaction scans. Several experiments were conducted to evaluate the algorithm's performance. Results demonstrate that CLHUN is efficient with these techniques and strategies.