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

A review of associative classification mining

Associative classification mining is a promising approach in data mining that utilizes the association rule discovery techniques to construct classification systems, also known as associative classifiers. In the last few years, a number of associative classification algorithms have been proposed, i.e. CPAR, CMAR, MCAR, MMAC and others. These algorithms employ several different rule discovery, rule ranking, rule pruning, rule prediction and rule evaluation methods. This paper focuses on surveying and comparing the state-of-the-art associative classification techniques with regards to the above criteria. Finally, future directions in associative classification, such as incremental learning and mining low-quality data sets, are also highlighted in this paper

Mining Event Logs to Support Workflow Resource Allocation

Workflow technology is widely used to facilitate the business process in enterprise information systems (EIS), and it has the potential to reduce design time, enhance product quality and decrease product cost. However, significant limitations still exist: as an important task in the context of workflow, many present resource allocation operations are still performed manually, which are time-consuming. This paper presents a data mining approach to address the resource allocation problem (RAP) and improve the productivity of workflow resource management. Specifically, an Apriori-like algorithm is used to find the frequent patterns from the event log, and association rules are generated according to predefined resource allocation constraints. Subsequently, a correlation measure named lift is utilized to annotate the negatively correlated resource allocation rules for resource reservation. Finally, the rules are ranked using the confidence measures as resource allocation rules. Comparative experiments are performed using C4.5, SVM, ID3, Na\"ive Bayes and the presented approach, and the results show that the presented approach is effective in both accuracy and candidate resource recommendations.Comment: T. Liu et al., Mining event logs to support workflow resource allocation, Knowl. Based Syst. (2012), http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1016/j.knosys.2012.05.01