Digital Symposium Collection 2000

SPIRIT: Sequential Pattern Mining with Regular Expression Constraints Minos N. Garofalakis, Rajeev Rastogi, and Kyuseok Shim   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Data Mining & Pattern Extraction Abstract Discovering sequential patterns is an important problem in data mining with a host of application domains including medicine, telecommunications, and the World Wide Web. Conventional mining systems provide users with only a very restricted mechanism (based on minimum support) for specifying patterns of interest. In this paper, we propose the use of Regular Expressions (REs) as a flexible constraint specification tool that enables user-controlled focus to be incorporated into the pattern mining process. We develop a family of novel algorithms (termed SPIRIT - Sequential Pattern mIning with Regular expressIon con-sTraints) for mining frequent sequential patterns that also satisfy user-specified RE constraints. The main distinguishing factor among the proposed schemes is the degree to which the RE constraints are enforced to prune the search space of patterns during computation. Our solutions provide valuable insights into the tradeoffs that arise when constraints that do not subscribe to nice properties (like anti-monotonicity) are integrated into the mining process. A quantitative exploration of these tradeoffs is conducted through an extensive experimental study on synthetic and real-life data sets. References Note: References link to DBLP on the Web. [1] Rakesh Agrawal , Giuseppe Psaila , Edward L. Wimmers , Mohamed Zaït : Querying Shapes of Histories. VLDB 1995 : 502-514 [2] Rakesh Agrawal , Ramakrishnan Srikant : Fast Algorithms for Mining Association Rules in Large Databases. VLDB 1994 : 487-499 [3] Rakesh Agrawal , Ramakrishnan Srikant : Mining Sequential Patterns. ICDE 1995 : 3-14 [4] Ming-Syan Chen , Jong Soo Park , Philip S. Yu : Efficient Data Mining for Path Traversal Patterns. TKDE 10(2) : 209-221(1998) [5] ... [6] Harry R. Lewis , Christos H. Papadimitriou : Elements of the Theory of Computation. Prentice-Hall 1981, ISBN 0-13-273417-6 [7] Heikki Mannila , Hannu Toivonen : Discovering Generalized Episodes Using Minimal Occurrences. KDD 1996 : 146-151 [8] Heikki Mannila , Hannu Toivonen , A. Inkeri Verkamo : Discovering Frequent Episodes in Sequences. KDD 1995 : 210-215 [9] Raymond T. Ng , Laks V. S. Lakshmanan , Jiawei Han , Alex Pang : Exploratory Mining and Pruning Optimizations of Constrained Association Rules. SIGMOD Conference 1998 : 13-24 [10] Ramakrishnan Srikant , Quoc Vu , Rakesh Agrawal : Mining Association Rules with Item Constraints. KDD 1997 : 67-73 [11] Ramakrishnan Srikant , Rakesh Agrawal : Mining Sequential Patterns: Generalizations and Performance Improvements. EDBT 1996 : 3-17 [12] Jason Tsong-Li Wang , Gung-Wei Chirn , Thomas G. Marr , Bruce A. Shapiro , Dennis Shasha , Kaizhong Zhang : Combinatorial Pattern Discovery for Scientific Data: Some Preliminary Results. SIGMOD Conference 1994 : 115-125 BIBTEX @inproceedings{DBLP:conf/vldb/GarofalakisRS99,   author    = {Minos N. Garofalakis and                 Rajeev Rastogi and                 Kyuseok Shim},    editor    = {Malcolm P. Atkinson and                 Maria E. Orlowska and                 Patrick Valduriez and                 Stanley B. Zdonik and                 Michael L. Brodie},    title     = {SPIRIT: Sequential Pattern Mining with Regular Expression Constraints},    booktitle = {VLDB'99, Proceedings of 25th International Conference on Very                 Large Data Bases, September 7-10, 1999, Edinburgh, Scotland,                 UK},    publisher = {Morgan Kaufmann},    year      = {1999},    isbn      = {1-55860-615-5},    pages     = {223-234},    crossref  = {DBLP:conf/vldb/99},    bibsource = {DBLP, http://dblp.uni-trier.de} } }, Copyright(C) 2000 ACM