Heuristic algorithms have been developed to find approximate solutions for high-utility itemset mining (HUIM) problems that compensate for the performance bottlenecks of exact algorithms. However, heuristic algorithms still face the problem of long runtime and insufficient mining quality, especially for large transaction datasets with thousands to tens of thousands of items and up to millions of transactions. To solve these problems, a novel GPU-based efficient parallel heuristic algorithm for HUIM (PHA-HUIM) is proposed in this paper. The iterative process of PHA-HUIM consists of three main steps: the search strategy, fitness evaluation, and ring topology communication. The search strategy and ring topology communication are designed to run in constant time on GPU. The parallelism of fitness evolution helps to substantially accelerate the algorithm. A new data structure with a sort-mapping strategy is proposed to enhance the search ability and reduce memory usage. To improve the mining quality, a multi-start strategy with an unbalanced allocation strategy is employed in the search process. Ring topology communication is adopted to maintain population diversity. A load balancing strategy is introduced to reduce the thread divergence to improve the parallel efficiency. The experimental results on nine large datasets show that PHA-HUIM outperforms state-of-the-art HUIM algorithms in terms of speedup performance, runtime, and mining quality.

Background: Rumor detection is a popular research topic in natural language processing and data mining. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, related rumors have been widely posted and spread on online social media, which have seriously affected people’s daily lives, national economy, social stability, etc. It is both theoretically and practically essential to detect and refute COVID-19 rumors fast and effectively. As COVID-19 was an emergent event that was outbreaking drastically, the related rumor instances were very scarce and distinct at its early stage. This makes the detection task a typical few-shot learning problem. However, traditional rumor detection techniques focused on detecting existed events with enough training instances, so that they fail to detect emergent events such as COVID-19. Therefore, developing a new few-shot rumor detection framework has become critical and emergent to prevent outbreaking rumors at early stages.Methods: This article focuses on few-shot rumor detection, especially for detecting COVID-19 rumors from Sina Weibo with only a minimal number of labeled instances. We contribute a Sina Weibo COVID-19 rumor dataset for few-shot rumor detection and propose a few-shot learning-based multi-modality fusion model for few-shot rumor detection. A full microblog consists of the source post and corresponding comments, which are considered as two modalities and fused with the meta-learning methods.Results: Experiments of few-shot rumor detection on the collected Weibo dataset and the PHEME public dataset have shown significant improvement and generality of the proposed model.