Mining constrained inter-sequence patterns: a novel approach to cope with item constraints

Abstract

Data mining has become increasingly important in the Internet era. The problem of mining inter-sequence pattern is a sub-task in data mining with several algorithms in the recent years. However, these algorithms only focus on the transitional problem of mining frequent inter-sequence patterns and most frequent inter-sequence patterns are either redundant or insignificant. As such, it can confuse end users during decision-making and can require too much system resources. This led to the problem of mining inter-sequence patterns with item constraints, which addressed the problem when end-users only concerned the patterns contained a number of specific items. In this paper, we propose two novel algorithms for it. First is the ISP-IC (Inter-Sequence Pattern with Item Constraint mining) algorithm based on a theorem that quickly determines whether an inter-sequence pattern satisfies the constraints. Then, we propose a way to improve the strategy of ISP-IC, which is then applied to the ISP-IC algorithm to enhance the performance of the process. Finally, pi ISP-IC, a parallel version of ISP-IC, will be presented. Experimental results show that pi ISP-IC algorithm outperforms the post-processing of the-state-of-the-art method for mining inter-sequence patterns (EISP-Miner), ISP-IC, and ISP-IC algorithms in most of the cases.