A new constraint for mining sets in sequences
Résumé
Discovering interesting patterns in event sequences is a popular task
in the field of data mining. Most existing methods try to do this
based on some measure of cohesion to determine an occurrence of a
pattern, and a frequency threshold to determine if the pattern occurs
often enough. We introduce a new constraint based on a new
interestingness measure combining the cohesion and the frequency of a
pattern. For a dataset consisting of a single sequence, the cohesion is measured as the average length of the
smallest intervals containing the pattern for each occurrence of its
events, and the frequency is measured as the probability of observing
an event of that pattern. We present a similar
constraint for datasets consisting of multiple sequences. We present
algorithms to efficiently identify the thus defined interesting
patterns, given a dataset and a user-defined threshold. After applying
our method to both synthetic and real-life data, we conclude that it
indeed gives intuitive results in a number of applications.