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Hybrid variations of metaheuristics that include data mining strategies have been utilized to solve a variety of combinatorial optimization problems, with superior and encouraging results. Previous hybrid strategies applied mined patterns to guide the construction of initial solutions, leading to more effective exploration of the solution space. Solving a combinatorial optimization problem is usually a hard task because its solution space grows exponentially with its size. Therefore, problem size reduction is also a useful strategy in this context, especially in the case of large-scale problems. In this paper, we build upon these ideas by presenting an approach named MineReduce, which uses mined patterns to perform problem size reduction. We present an application of MineReduce to improve a heuristic for the heterogeneous fleet vehicle routing problem. The results obtained in computational experiments show that this proposed heuristic demonstrates superior performance compared to the original heuristic and other state-of-the-art heuristics, achieving better solution costs with shorter run times.