An efficient parallel method for mining frequent closed sequential patterns

Mining frequent closed sequential pattern (FCSPs) has attracted a great deal of research attention, because it is an important task in sequences mining. In recently, many studies have focused on mining frequent closed sequential patterns because, such patterns have proved to be more efficient and compact than frequent sequential patterns. Information can be fully extracted from frequent closed sequential patterns. In this paper, we propose an efficient parallel approach called parallel dynamic bit vector frequent closed sequential patterns (pDBV-FCSP) using multi-core processor architecture for mining FCSPs from large databases. The pDBV-FCSP divides the search space to reduce the required storage space and performs closure checking of prefix sequences early to reduce execution time for mining frequent closed sequential patterns. This approach overcomes the problems of parallel mining such as overhead of communication, synchronization, and data replication. It also solves the load balance issues of the workload between the processors with a dynamic mechanism that re-distributes the work, when some processes are out of work to minimize the idle CPU time.Web of Science5174021739

A genetic algorithm coupled with tree-based pruning for mining closed association rules

Due to the voluminous amount of itemsets that are generated, the association rules extracted from these itemsets contain redundancy, and designing an effective approach to address this issue is of paramount importance. Although multiple algorithms were proposed in recent years for mining closed association rules most of them underperform in terms of run time or memory. Another issue that remains challenging is the nature of the dataset. While some of the existing algorithms perform well on dense datasets others perform well on sparse datasets. This paper aims to handle these drawbacks by using a genetic algorithm for mining closed association rules. Recent studies have shown that genetic algorithms perform better than conventional algorithms due to their bitwise operations of crossover and mutation. Bitwise operations are predominantly faster than conventional approaches and bits consume lesser memory thereby improving the overall performance of the algorithm. To address the redundancy in the mined association rules a tree-based pruning algorithm has been designed here. This works on the principle of minimal antecedent and maximal consequent. Experiments have shown that the proposed approach works well on both dense and sparse datasets while surpassing existing techniques with regard to run time and memory

Parallel Methods for Mining Frequent Sequential patterns

The explosive growth of data and the rapid progress of technology have led to a huge amount of data that is collected every day. In that data volume contains much valuable information. Data mining is the emerging field of applying statistical and artificial intelligence techniques to the problem of finding novel, useful and non-trivial patterns from large databases. It is the task of discovering interesting patterns from large amounts of data. This is achieved by determining both implicit and explicit unidentified patterns in data that can direct the process of decision making. There are many data mining tasks, such as classification, clustering, association rule mining and sequential pattern mining. In that, sequential pattern mining is an important problem in data mining. It provides an effective way to analyze the sequence data. The goal of sequential pattern mining is to discover interesting, unexpected and useful patterns from sequence databases. This task is used in many wide applications such as financial data analysis of banks, retail industry, customer shopping history, goods transportation, consumption and services, telecommunication industry, biological data analysis, scientific applications, network intrusion detection, scientific research, etc. Different types of sequential pattern mining can be performed, they are sequential patterns, maximal sequential patterns, closed sequences, constraint based and time interval based sequential patterns. Sequential pattern mining refers to the identification of frequent subsequences in sequence databases as patterns. In the last two decades, researchers have proposed many techniques and algorithms for extracting the frequent sequential patterns, in which the downward closure property plays a fundamental role. Sequential pattern is a sequence of itemsets that frequently occur in a specific order, where all items in the same itemsets are supposed to have the same transaction time value. One of the challenges for sequential pattern mining is the computational costs beside that is the potentially huge number of extracted patterns. In this thesis, we present an overview of the work done for sequential pattern mining and develop parallel methods for mining frequent sequential patterns in sequence databases that can tackle emerging data processing workloads while coping with larger and larger scales.The explosive growth of data and the rapid progress of technology have led to a huge amount of data that is collected every day. In that data volume contains much valuable information. Data mining is the emerging field of applying statistical and artificial intelligence techniques to the problem of finding novel, useful and non-trivial patterns from large databases. It is the task of discovering interesting patterns from large amounts of data. This is achieved by determining both implicit and explicit unidentified patterns in data that can direct the process of decision making. There are many data mining tasks, such as classification, clustering, association rule mining and sequential pattern mining. In that, sequential pattern mining is an important problem in data mining. It provides an effective way to analyze the sequence data. The goal of sequential pattern mining is to discover interesting, unexpected and useful patterns from sequence databases. This task is used in many wide applications such as financial data analysis of banks, retail industry, customer shopping history, goods transportation, consumption and services, telecommunication industry, biological data analysis, scientific applications, network intrusion detection, scientific research, etc. Different types of sequential pattern mining can be performed, they are sequential patterns, maximal sequential patterns, closed sequences, constraint based and time interval based sequential patterns. Sequential pattern mining refers to the identification of frequent subsequences in sequence databases as patterns. In the last two decades, researchers have proposed many techniques and algorithms for extracting the frequent sequential patterns, in which the downward closure property plays a fundamental role. Sequential pattern is a sequence of itemsets that frequently occur in a specific order, where all items in the same itemsets are supposed to have the same transaction time value. One of the challenges for sequential pattern mining is the computational costs beside that is the potentially huge number of extracted patterns. In this thesis, we present an overview of the work done for sequential pattern mining and develop parallel methods for mining frequent sequential patterns in sequence databases that can tackle emerging data processing workloads while coping with larger and larger scales.460 - Katedra informatikyvyhově

Frequent itemset mining on multiprocessor systems

Frequent itemset mining is an important building block in many data mining applications like market basket analysis, recommendation, web-mining, fraud detection, and gene expression analysis. In many of them, the datasets being mined can easily grow up to hundreds of gigabytes or even terabytes of data. Hence, efficient algorithms are required to process such large amounts of data. In recent years, there have been many frequent-itemset mining algorithms proposed, which however (1) often have high memory requirements and (2) do not exploit the large degrees of parallelism provided by modern multiprocessor systems. The high memory requirements arise mainly from inefficient data structures that have only been shown to be sufficient for small datasets. For large datasets, however, the use of these data structures force the algorithms to go out-of-core, i.e., they have to access secondary memory, which leads to serious performance degradations. Exploiting available parallelism is further required to mine large datasets because the serial performance of processors almost stopped increasing. Algorithms should therefore exploit the large number of available threads and also the other kinds of parallelism (e.g., vector instruction sets) besides thread-level parallelism. In this work, we tackle the high memory requirements of frequent itemset mining twofold: we (1) compress the datasets being mined because they must be kept in main memory during several mining invocations and (2) improve existing mining algorithms with memory-efficient data structures. For compressing the datasets, we employ efficient encodings that show a good compression performance on a wide variety of realistic datasets, i.e., the size of the datasets is reduced by up to 6.4x. The encodings can further be applied directly while loading the dataset from disk or network. Since encoding and decoding is repeatedly required for loading and mining the datasets, we reduce its costs by providing parallel encodings that achieve high throughputs for both tasks. For a memory-efficient representation of the mining algorithms’ intermediate data, we propose compact data structures and even employ explicit compression. Both methods together reduce the intermediate data’s size by up to 25x. The smaller memory requirements avoid or delay expensive out-of-core computation when large datasets are mined. For coping with the high parallelism provided by current multiprocessor systems, we identify the performance hot spots and scalability issues of existing frequent-itemset mining algorithms. The hot spots, which form basic building blocks of these algorithms, cover (1) counting the frequency of fixed-length strings, (2) building prefix trees, (3) compressing integer values, and (4) intersecting lists of sorted integer values or bitmaps. For all of them, we discuss how to exploit available parallelism and provide scalable solutions. Furthermore, almost all components of the mining algorithms must be parallelized to keep the sequential fraction of the algorithms as small as possible. We integrate the parallelized building blocks and components into three well-known mining algorithms and further analyze the impact of certain existing optimizations. Our algorithms are already single-threaded often up an order of magnitude faster than existing highly optimized algorithms and further scale almost linear on a large 32-core multiprocessor system. Although our optimizations are intended for frequent-itemset mining algorithms, they can be applied with only minor changes to algorithms that are used for mining of other types of itemsets

A Taxonomy of Sequential Patterns Based Recommendation Systems

With remarkable expansion of information through the internet, users prefer to receive the exact information they need through some suggestions to save their time and money. Thus, recommendation systems have become the heart of business strategies of E-commerce as they can increase sales and revenue as well as customer loyalty. Recommendation systems techniques provide suggestions for items/products to be purchased, rented or used by a user. The most common type of recommendation system technique is Collaborative Filtering (CF), which takes user’s interest in an item (explicit rating) as input in a matrix known as the user-item rating matrix, and produces an output for unknown ratings of users for items from which top N recommended items for target users are defined. E-commerce recommendation systems usually deal with massive customer sequential databases such as historical purchase or click sequences. The time stamp of a click or purchase event is an important attribute of each dataset as the time interval between item purchases may be useful to learn the next items for purchase by users. Sequential Pattern Mining mines frequent or high utility sequential patterns from a sequential database. Recommendation systems accuracy will be improved if complex sequential patterns of user purchase behavior are learned by integrating sequential patterns of customer clicks and/or purchases into the user-item rating matrix input. Thus, integrating collaborative filtering (CF) and sequential pattern mining (SPM) of historical clicks and purchase data can improve recommendation accuracy, diversity and quality and this survey focuses on review of existing recommendation systems that are sequential pattern based exposing their methodologies, achievements, limitations, and potentials for solving more problems in this domain. This thesis provides a comprehensive and comparative study of the existing Sequential Pattern-based E-commerce recommendation systems (SP-based E-commerce RS) such as ChoRec05, ChenRec09, HuangRec09, LiuRec09, ChoiRec12, Hybrid Model RecSys16, Product RecSys16, SainiRec17, HPCRec18 and HSPCRec19. Thesis shows that integrating sequential patterns mining (SPM) of historical purchase and/or click sequences into user-item matrix for collaborative filtering (CF) (i) Improved recommendation accuracy (ii) Reduced limiting user-item rating data Sparsity (iii) Increased Novelty Rate of the recommendations and (iv) Improved Scalability of the recommendation system. Thus, the importance of sequential patterns of customer behavior in improving the quality of recommendation systems for the application domain of E-commerce is accentuated through this survey by having a comparative performance analysis of the surveyed systems

The EDAM Project: Mining Atmospheric Aerosol Datasets

Data mining has been a very active area of research in the database, machine learning, and mathematical programming communities in recent years. EDAM (Exploratory Data Analysis and Management) is a joint project between researchers in Atmospheric Chemistry and Computer Science at Carleton College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison that aims to develop data mining techniques for advancing the state of the art in analyzing atmospheric aerosol datasets. There is a great need to better understand the sources, dynamics, and compositions of atmospheric aerosols. The traditional approach for particle measurement, which is the collection of bulk samples of particulates on filters, is not adequate for studying particle dynamics and real-time correlations. This has led to the development of a new generation of real-time instruments that provide continuous or semi-continuous streams of data about certain aerosol properties. However, these instruments have added a significant level of complexity to atmospheric aerosol data, and dramatically increased the amounts of data to be collected, managed, and analyzed. Our abilit y to integrate the data from all of these new and complex instruments now lags far behind our data-collection capabilities, and severely limits our ability to understand the data and act upon it in a timely manner. In this paper, we present an overview of the EDAM project. The goal of the project, which is in its early stages, is to develop novel data mining algorithms and approaches to managing and monitoring multiple complex data streams. An important objective is data quality assurance, and real-time data mining offers great potential. The approach that we take should also provide good techniques to deal with gas-phase and semi-volatile data. While atmospheric aerosol analysis is an important and challenging domain that motivates us with real problems and serves as a concrete test of our results, our objective is to develop techniques that have broader applicability, and to explore some fundamental challenges in data mining that are not specific to any given application domain

Efficient algorithms for mining clickstream patterns using pseudo-IDLists

Sequential pattern mining is an important task in data mining. Its subproblem, clickstream pattern mining, is starting to attract more research due to the growth of the Internet and the need to analyze online customer behaviors. To date, only few works are dedicately proposed for the problem of mining clickstream patterns. Although one approach is to use the general algorithms for sequential pattern mining, those algorithms’ performance may suffer and the resources needed are more than would be necessary with a dedicated method for mining clickstreams. In this paper, we present pseudo-IDList, a novel data structure that is more suitable for clickstream pattern mining. Based on this structure, a vertical format algorithm named CUP (Clickstream pattern mining Using Pseudo-IDList) is proposed. Furthermore, we propose a pruning heuristic named DUB (Dynamic intersection Upper Bound) to improve our proposed algorithm. Four real-life clickstream databases are used for the experiments and the results show that our proposed methods are effective and efficient regarding runtimes and memory consumption. © 2020 Elsevier B.V.Vietnam National Foundation for Science and Technology Development (NAFOSTED)National Foundation for Science & Technology Development (NAFOSTED) [02/2019/TN

Efficient Frequent Subtree Mining Beyond Forests

A common paradigm in distance-based learning is to embed the instance space into some appropriately chosen feature space equipped with a metric and to define the dissimilarity between instances by the distance of their images in the feature space. If the instances are graphs, then frequent connected subgraphs are a well-suited pattern language to define such feature spaces. Identifying the set of frequent connected subgraphs and subsequently computing embeddings for graph instances, however, is computationally intractable. As a result, existing frequent subgraph mining algorithms either restrict the structural complexity of the instance graphs or require exponential delay between the output of subsequent patterns. Hence distance-based learners lack an efficient way to operate on arbitrary graph data. To resolve this problem, in this thesis we present a mining system that gives up the demand on the completeness of the pattern set to instead guarantee a polynomial delay between subsequent patterns. Complementing this, we devise efficient methods to compute the embedding of arbitrary graphs into the Hamming space spanned by our pattern set. As a result, we present a system that allows to efficiently apply distance-based learning methods to arbitrary graph databases. To overcome the computational intractability of the mining step, we consider only frequent subtrees for arbitrary graph databases. This restriction alone, however, does not suffice to make the problem tractable. We reduce the mining problem from arbitrary graphs to forests by replacing each graph by a polynomially sized forest obtained from a random sample of its spanning trees. This results in an incomplete mining algorithm. However, we prove that the probability of missing a frequent subtree pattern is low. We show empirically that this is true in practice even for very small sized forests. As a result, our algorithm is able to mine frequent subtrees in a range of graph databases where state-of-the-art exact frequent subgraph mining systems fail to produce patterns in reasonable time or even at all. Furthermore, the predictive performance of our patterns is comparable to that of exact frequent connected subgraphs, where available. The above method considers polynomially many spanning trees for the forest, while many graphs have exponentially many spanning trees. The number of patterns found by our mining algorithm can be negatively influenced by this exponential gap. We hence propose a method that can (implicitly) consider forests of exponential size, while remaining computationally tractable. This results in a higher recall for our incomplete mining algorithm. Furthermore, the methods extend the known positive results on the tractability of exact frequent subtree mining to a novel class of transaction graphs. We conjecture that the next natural extension of our results to a larger transaction graph class is at least as difficult as proving whether P = NP, or not. Regarding the graph embedding step, we apply a similar strategy as in the mining step. We represent a novel graph by a forest of its spanning trees and decide whether the frequent trees from the mining step are subgraph isomorphic to this forest. As a result, the embedding computation has one-sided error with respect to the exact subgraph isomorphism test but is computationally tractable. Furthermore, we show that we can leverage a partial order on the pattern set. This structure can be used to reduce the runtime of the embedding computation dramatically. For the special case of Jaccard-similarity between graph embeddings, a further substantial reduction of runtime can be achieved using min-hashing. The Jaccard-distance can be approximated using small sketch vectors that can be computed fast, again using the partial order on the tree patterns