The document discusses the Apriori algorithm for mining association rules from transactional data. The Apriori algorithm uses a level-wise search where frequent itemsets are used to explore longer itemsets. It determines frequent itemsets by identifying individual frequent items and extending them to larger sets as long as they meet a minimum support threshold. The algorithm takes advantage of the fact that subsets of frequent itemsets must also be frequent to prune the search space. It performs candidate generation and pruning to efficiently identify all frequent itemsets in the transactional data.