Hi, Well this is a way I have been advised to do. Previously, I have tried to use apriori but the time and memory cost was too much to process half of items with even two transactions. thus I switched to use a heuristic way such as the one suggested in [2] Is there anyway that I can use a small part, say 20x20, of the sparse matrix. As ECJ does not have such an option I am trying to write a java code for that. Am I in the right track? [2] Ghosh et al. 2010, Mining Frequent Itemsets Using GA Cheers, Hooman