A node linkage approach for sequential pattern mining

PLoS One. 2014 Jun 16;9(6):e95418. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0095418. eCollection 2014.

Abstract

Sequential Pattern Mining is a widely addressed problem in data mining, with applications such as analyzing Web usage, examining purchase behavior, and text mining, among others. Nevertheless, with the dramatic increase in data volume, the current approaches prove inefficient when dealing with large input datasets, a large number of different symbols and low minimum supports. In this paper, we propose a new sequential pattern mining algorithm, which follows a pattern-growth scheme to discover sequential patterns. Unlike most pattern growth algorithms, our approach does not build a data structure to represent the input dataset, but instead accesses the required sequences through pseudo-projection databases, achieving better runtime and reducing memory requirements. Our algorithm traverses the search space in a depth-first fashion and only preserves in memory a pattern node linkage and the pseudo-projections required for the branch being explored at the time. Experimental results show that our new approach, the Node Linkage Depth-First Traversal algorithm (NLDFT), has better performance and scalability in comparison with state of the art algorithms.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Data Mining / methods*
  • Databases, Factual
  • Pattern Recognition, Automated / methods*

Grants and funding

This work was done under partial support of CONACyT (Project grants 106013, 106443 and 158135). The first author was funded by CONACyT (grant 51443) (www.conacyt.mx). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.