The present disclosure describes methods, systems, and computer program products for improving frequent itemset mining. One computer-implemented method includes receiving, by operation of a computer system, a dataset of multiple transactions, each of the multiple transactions including one or more items; determining, by operation of the computer system, a ubiquitousness parameter of an item representing a frequency of occurrences of the item in the dataset; filtering, by operation of the computer system, out from the dataset one or more items that have ubiquitousness parameters larger than a ubiquitousness threshold; identifying, by operation of the computer system, one or more association rules that satisfy a confidence constraint based on the filtered dataset; and outputting, by operation of the computer system, the one or more association rules that satisfy the confidence constraint.