  Mining frequent itemsets from a transaction database has emerged as a
fundamental problem in data mining and committed itself as a building block for
many pattern mining tasks. In this paper, we present a general technique to
reduce support checking time in existing depth-first search generate-and-test
schemes such as Eclat/dEclat and PrePost+. Our technique allows infrequent
candidate itemsets to be detected early. The technique is based on an
early-stopping criterion and is general enough to be applicable in many
frequent itemset mining algorithms. We have applied the technique to two
TID-list based schemes (Eclat/dEclat) and one N-list based scheme (PrePost+).
Our technique has been tested over a variety of datasets and confirmed its
effectiveness in runtime reduction.
