  We study the problem of frequent itemset mining in domains where data is not
recorded in a conventional database but only exists in human knowledge. We
provide examples of such scenarios, and present a crowdsourcing model for them.
The model uses the crowd as an oracle to find out whether an itemset is
frequent or not, and relies on a known taxonomy of the item domain to guide the
search for frequent itemsets. In the spirit of data mining with oracles, we
analyze the complexity of this problem in terms of (i) crowd complexity, that
measures the number of crowd questions required to identify the frequent
itemsets; and (ii) computational complexity, that measures the computational
effort required to choose the questions. We provide lower and upper complexity
bounds in terms of the size and structure of the input taxonomy, as well as the
size of a concise description of the output itemsets. We also provide
constructive algorithms that achieve the upper bounds, and consider more
efficient variants for practical situations.
