1,350 research outputs found
A Model-Based Frequency Constraint for Mining Associations from Transaction Data
Mining frequent itemsets is a popular method for finding associated items in
databases. For this method, support, the co-occurrence frequency of the items
which form an association, is used as the primary indicator of the
associations's significance. A single user-specified support threshold is used
to decided if associations should be further investigated. Support has some
known problems with rare items, favors shorter itemsets and sometimes produces
misleading associations.
In this paper we develop a novel model-based frequency constraint as an
alternative to a single, user-specified minimum support. The constraint
utilizes knowledge of the process generating transaction data by applying a
simple stochastic mixture model (the NB model) which allows for transaction
data's typically highly skewed item frequency distribution. A user-specified
precision threshold is used together with the model to find local frequency
thresholds for groups of itemsets. Based on the constraint we develop the
notion of NB-frequent itemsets and adapt a mining algorithm to find all
NB-frequent itemsets in a database. In experiments with publicly available
transaction databases we show that the new constraint provides improvements
over a single minimum support threshold and that the precision threshold is
more robust and easier to set and interpret by the user
Reductions for Frequency-Based Data Mining Problems
Studying the computational complexity of problems is one of the - if not the
- fundamental questions in computer science. Yet, surprisingly little is known
about the computational complexity of many central problems in data mining. In
this paper we study frequency-based problems and propose a new type of
reduction that allows us to compare the complexities of the maximal frequent
pattern mining problems in different domains (e.g. graphs or sequences). Our
results extend those of Kimelfeld and Kolaitis [ACM TODS, 2014] to a broader
range of data mining problems. Our results show that, by allowing constraints
in the pattern space, the complexities of many maximal frequent pattern mining
problems collapse. These problems include maximal frequent subgraphs in
labelled graphs, maximal frequent itemsets, and maximal frequent subsequences
with no repetitions. In addition to theoretical interest, our results might
yield more efficient algorithms for the studied problems.Comment: This is an extended version of a paper of the same title to appear in
the Proceedings of the 17th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining
(ICDM'17
Flexible constrained sampling with guarantees for pattern mining
Pattern sampling has been proposed as a potential solution to the infamous
pattern explosion. Instead of enumerating all patterns that satisfy the
constraints, individual patterns are sampled proportional to a given quality
measure. Several sampling algorithms have been proposed, but each of them has
its limitations when it comes to 1) flexibility in terms of quality measures
and constraints that can be used, and/or 2) guarantees with respect to sampling
accuracy. We therefore present Flexics, the first flexible pattern sampler that
supports a broad class of quality measures and constraints, while providing
strong guarantees regarding sampling accuracy. To achieve this, we leverage the
perspective on pattern mining as a constraint satisfaction problem and build
upon the latest advances in sampling solutions in SAT as well as existing
pattern mining algorithms. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm is applicable to
a variety of pattern languages, which allows us to introduce and tackle the
novel task of sampling sets of patterns. We introduce and empirically evaluate
two variants of Flexics: 1) a generic variant that addresses the well-known
itemset sampling task and the novel pattern set sampling task as well as a wide
range of expressive constraints within these tasks, and 2) a specialized
variant that exploits existing frequent itemset techniques to achieve
substantial speed-ups. Experiments show that Flexics is both accurate and
efficient, making it a useful tool for pattern-based data exploration.Comment: Accepted for publication in Data Mining & Knowledge Discovery journal
(ECML/PKDD 2017 journal track
Using Answer Set Programming for pattern mining
Serial pattern mining consists in extracting the frequent sequential patterns
from a unique sequence of itemsets. This paper explores the ability of a
declarative language, such as Answer Set Programming (ASP), to solve this issue
efficiently. We propose several ASP implementations of the frequent sequential
pattern mining task: a non-incremental and an incremental resolution. The
results show that the incremental resolution is more efficient than the
non-incremental one, but both ASP programs are less efficient than dedicated
algorithms. Nonetheless, this approach can be seen as a first step toward a
generic framework for sequential pattern mining with constraints.Comment: Intelligence Artificielle Fondamentale (2014
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