CAS-MINE: Providing personalized services in context-aware applications by means of generalized rules

Context-aware systems acquire and exploit information on the user context to tailor services to a particular user, place, time, and/or event. Hence, they allowservice providers to adapt their services to actual user needs, by offering personalized services depending on the current user context. Service providers are usually interested in profiling users both to increase client satisfaction and to broaden the set of offered services. Novel and efficient techniques are needed to tailor service supply to the user (or the user category) and to the situation inwhich he/she is involved. This paper presents the CAS-Mine framework to efficiently discover relevant relationships between user context data and currently asked services for both user and service profiling. CAS-Mine efficiently extracts generalized association rules, which provide a high-level abstraction of both user habits and service characteristics depending on the context. A lazy (analyst-provided) taxonomy evaluation performed on different attributes (e.g., a geographic hierarchy on spatial coordinates, a classification of provided services) drives the rule generalization process. Extracted rules are classified into groups according to their semantic meaning and ranked by means of quality indices, thus allowing a domain expert to focus on the most relevant patterns. Experiments performed on three context-aware datasets, obtained by logging user requests and context information for three real applications, show the effectiveness and the efficiency of the CAS-Mine framework in mining different valuable types of correlations between user habits, context information, and provided services

Data mining by means of generalized patterns

The thesis is mainly focused on the study and the application of pattern discovery algorithms that aggregate database knowledge to discover and exploit valuable correlations, hidden in the analyzed data, at different abstraction levels. The aim of the research effort described in this work is two-fold: the discovery of associations, in the form of generalized patterns, from large data collections and the inference of semantic models, i.e., taxonomies and ontologies, suitable for driving the mining proces

Misleading Generalized Itemset discovery

Frequent generalized itemset mining is a data mining technique utilized to discover a high-level view of interesting knowledge hidden in the analyzed data. By exploiting a taxonomy, patterns are usually extracted at any level of abstraction. However, some misleading high-level patterns could be included in the mined set. This paper proposes a novel generalized itemset type, namely the Misleading Generalized Itemset (MGI). Each MGI represents a frequent generalized itemset X and its set E of low-level frequent descendants for which the correlation type is in contrast to the one of X. To allow experts to analyze the misleading high-level data correlations separately and exploit such knowledge by making different decisions, MGIs are extracted only if the low-level descendant itemsets that represent contrasting correlations cover almost the same portion of data as the high-level (misleading) ancestor. An algorithm to mine MGIs at the top of traditional generalized itemsets is also proposed. The experiments performed on both real and synthetic datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approac

Twitter data analysis by means of Strong Flipping Generalized Itemsets

Twitter data has recently been considered to perform a large variety of advanced analysis. Analysis ofTwitter data imposes new challenges because the data distribution is intrinsically sparse, due to a large number of messages post every day by using a wide vocabulary. Aimed at addressing this issue, generalized itemsets - sets of items at different abstraction levels - can be effectively mined and used todiscover interesting multiple-level correlations among data supplied with taxonomies. Each generalizeditemset is characterized by a correlation type (positive, negative, or null) according to the strength of thecorrelation among its items.This paper presents a novel data mining approach to supporting different and interesting targetedanalysis - topic trend analysis, context-aware service profiling - by analyzing Twitter posts. We aim atdiscovering contrasting situations by means of generalized itemsets. Specifically, we focus on comparingitemsets discovered at different abstraction levels and we select large subsets of specific (descendant)itemsets that show correlation type changes with respect to their common ancestor. To this aim, a novelkind of pattern, namely the Strong Flipping Generalized Itemset (SFGI), is extracted from Twitter mes-sages and contextual information supplied with taxonomy hierarchies. Each SFGI consists of a frequentgeneralized itemset X and the set of its descendants showing a correlation type change with respect to X. Experiments performed on both real and synthetic datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the pro-posed approach in discovering interesting and hidden knowledge from Twitter dat

Expressive generalized itemsets

Generalized itemset mining is a powerful tool to discover multiple-level correlations among the analyzed data. A taxonomy is used to aggregate data items into higher-level concepts and to discover frequent recurrences among data items at different granularity levels. However, since traditional high-level itemsets may also represent the knowledge covered by their lower-level frequent descendant itemsets, the expressiveness of high-level itemsets can be rather limited. To overcome this issue, this article proposes two novel itemset types, called Expressive Generalized Itemset (EGI) and Maximal Expressive Generalized Itemset (Max-EGI), in which the frequency of occurrence of a high-level itemset is evaluated only on the portion of data not yet covered by any of its frequent descendants. Specifically, EGI s represent, at a high level of abstraction, the knowledge associated with sets of infrequent itemsets, while Max-EGIs compactly represent all the infrequent descendants of a generalized itemset. Furthermore, we also propose an algorithm to discover Max-EGIs at the top of the traditionally mined itemsets. Experiments, performed on both real and synthetic datasets, demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability of the proposed approac