Diverse subgroup set discovery

Large data is challenging for most existing discovery algorithms, for several reasons. First of all, such data leads to enormous hypothesis spaces, making exhaustive search infeasible. Second, many variants of essentially the same pattern exist, due to (numeric) attributes of high cardinality, correlated attributes, and so on. This causes top-k mining algorithms to return highly redundant result sets, while ignoring many potentially interesting results. These problems are particularly apparent with subgroup discovery (SD) and its generalisation, exceptional model mining. To address this, we introduce subgroup set discovery: one should not consider individual subgroups, but sets of subgroups. We consider three degrees of redundancy, and propose corresponding heuristic selection strategies in order to eliminate redundancy. By incorporating these (generic) subgroup selection methods in a beam search, the aim is to improve the balance between exploration and exploitation. The proposed algorithm, dubbed DSSD for diverse subgroup set discovery, is experimentally evaluated and compared to existing approaches. For this, a variety of target types with corresponding datasets and quality measures is used. The subgroup sets that are discovered by the competing methods are evaluated primarily on the following three criteria: (1) diversity in the subgroup covers (exploration), (2) the maximum quality found (exploitation), and (3) runtime. The results show that DSSD outperforms each traditional SD method on all or a (non-empty) subset of these criteria, depending on the specific setting. The more complex the task, the larger the benefit of using our diverse heuristic search turns out to be.     

On the adaptability of G3PARM to the extraction of rare association rules

To date, association rule mining has mainly focused on the discovery of frequent patterns. Nevertheless, it is often interesting to focus on those that do not frequently occur. Existing algorithms for mining this kind of infrequent patterns are mainly based on exhaustive search methods and can be applied only over categorical domains. In a previous work, the use of grammar-guided genetic programming for the discovery of frequent association rules was introduced, showing that this proposal was competitive in terms of scalability, expressiveness, flexibility and the ability to restrict the search space. The goal of this work is to demonstrate that this proposal is also appropriate for the discovery of rare association rules. This approach allows one to obtain solutions within specified time limits and does not require large amounts of memory, as current algorithms do. It also provides mechanisms to discard noise from the rare association rule set by applying four different and specific fitness functions, which are compared and studied in depth. Finally, this approach is compared with other existing algorithms for mining rare association rules, and an analysis of the mined rules is performed. As a result, this approach mines rare rules in a homogeneous and low execution time. The experimental study shows that this proposal obtains a small and accurate set of rules close to the size specified by the data miner.     

基于蒙特卡洛树搜索的数值目标子群发现算法

MonteCloPi算法是一种基于蒙特卡洛树搜索(Monte Carlo tree search, MCTS)的任意时间子群发现算法,旨在使用MCTS策略构建非对称的最佳优先搜索树来发现高质量的多样性模式集,但是限制了目标为二值变量.为此,本文结合了数值目标的特点,通过为置信度上界(upper confidence bound, UCB)公式选取合适的C值、动态调整各个样本的拓展权重并对搜索树进行剪枝、使用自适应top-k均值更新策略,将MonteCloPi算法拓展到了数值目标.最后,在UCI数据集、全国健康与营养调查(national health and nutrition examination survey, NHANES)听力测试数据集上的实验结果表明本文的算法相比其他算法可以发现更高质量的多样性模式集,并且最优子群的可解释性也更好.     

Closed inter-sequence pattern mining

Inter-sequence pattern mining can find associations across several sequences in a sequence database, which can discover both a sequential pattern within a transaction and sequential patterns across several different transactions. However, inter-sequence pattern mining algorithms usually generate a large number of recurrent frequent patterns. We have observed mining closed inter-sequence patterns instead of frequent ones can lead to a more compact yet complete result set. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a model of closed inter-sequence pattern mining and an efficient algorithm called CISP-Miner for mining such patterns, which enumerates closed inter-sequence patterns recursively along a search tree in a depth-first search manner. In addition, several effective pruning strategies and closure checking schemes are designed to reduce the search space and thus accelerate the algorithm. Our experiment results demonstrate that the proposed CISP-Miner algorithm is very efficient and outperforms a compared EISP-Miner algorithm in most cases.     

挖掘闭合模式的高性能算法

频繁闭合模式集惟一确定频繁模式完全集并且尺寸小得多,然而挖掘频繁闭合模式仍然是时间与存储开销很大的任务.提出一种高性能算法来解决这一难题.采用复合型频繁模式树来组织频繁模式集,存储开销较小.通过集成深度与宽度优先策略,伺机选择基于数组或基于树的模式支持子集表示形式,启发式运用非过滤虚拟投影或过滤型投影,实现复合型频繁模式树的快速生成.局部和全局剪裁方法有效地缩小了搜索空间.通过树生成与剪裁代价的平衡实现时间效率与可伸缩性最大化.实验表明,该算法时间效率比其他算法高5倍到3个数量级,空间可伸缩性最佳.它可以进一步应用到无冗余关联规则发现、序列分析等许多数据挖掘问题.     

Efficient Mining of Frequent Closed XML Query Pattern

Previous research works have presented convincing arguments that a frequent pattern mining algorithm should not mine all frequent but only the closed ones because the latter leads to not only more compact yet complete result set but also better efficiency. Upon discovery of frequent closed XML query patterns, indexing and caching can be effectively adopted for query performance enhancement. Most of the previous algorithms for finding frequent patterns basically introduced a straightforward generate-and-test strategy. In this paper, we present SOLARIA＊, an efficient algorithm for mining frequent closed XML query patterns without candidate maintenance and costly tree-containment checking. Efficient algorithm of sequence mining is involved in discovering frequent tree-structured patterns, which aims at replacing expensive containment testing with cheap parent-child checking in sequences. SOLARIA＊ deeply prunes unrelated search space for frequent pattern enumeration by parent-child relationship constraint. By a thorough experimental study on various real-life data, we demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of SOLARIA＊ over the previous known alternative. SOLARIA＊ is also linearly scalable in terms of XML queries＇ size.     

A constraint-based querying system for exploratory pattern discovery

In this article we present ConQueSt, a constraint-based querying system able to support the intrinsically exploratory (i.e., human-guided, interactive and iterative) nature of pattern discovery. Following the inductive database vision, our framework provides users with an expressive constraint-based query language, which allows the discovery process to be effectively driven toward potentially interesting patterns. Such constraints are also exploited to reduce the cost of pattern mining computation. ConQueSt is a comprehensive mining system that can access real-world relational databases from which to extract data. Through the interaction with a friendly graphical user interface (GUI), the user can define complex mining queries by means of few clicks. After a pre-processing step, mining queries are answered by an efficient and robust pattern mining engine which entails the state-of-the-art of data and search space reduction techniques. Resulting patterns are then presented to the user in a pattern browsing window, and possibly stored back in the underlying database as relations.     

Selective Search for Object Recognition

This paper addresses the problem of generating possible object locations for use in object recognition. We introduce selective search which combines the strength of both an exhaustive search and segmentation. Like segmentation, we use the image structure to guide our sampling process. Like exhaustive search, we aim to capture all possible object locations. Instead of a single technique to generate possible object locations, we diversify our search and use a variety of complementary image partitionings to deal with as many image conditions as possible. Our selective search results in a small set of data-driven, class-independent, high quality locations, yielding 99 % recall and a Mean Average Best Overlap of 0.879 at 10,097 locations. The reduced number of locations compared to an exhaustive search enables the use of stronger machine learning techniques and stronger appearance models for object recognition. In this paper we show that our selective search enables the use of the powerful Bag-of-Words model for recognition. The selective search software is made publicly available (Software: http://disi.unitn.it/~uijlings/SelectiveSearch.html).     

Frequent subgraph mining in outerplanar graphs

In recent years there has been an increased interest in frequent pattern discovery in large databases of graph structured objects. While the frequent connected subgraph mining problem for tree datasets can be solved in incremental polynomial time, it becomes intractable for arbitrary graph databases. Existing approaches have therefore resorted to various heuristic strategies and restrictions of the search space, but have not identified a practically relevant tractable graph class beyond trees. In this paper, we consider the class of outerplanar graphs, a strict generalization of trees, develop a frequent subgraph mining algorithm for outerplanar graphs, and show that it works in incremental polynomial time for the practically relevant subclass of well-behaved outerplanar graphs, i.e., which have only polynomially many simple cycles. We evaluate the algorithm empirically on chemo- and bioinformatics applications.     

基于多效用阈值的分布式高效用序列模式挖掘

针对序列模式的高效用模式挖掘过程中搜索空间大、计算复杂度高的问题,提出一种基于多效用阈值的分布式高效用序列模式挖掘算法。采用数组结构保存模式的效用信息,解决效用矩阵导致的内存消耗大的缺点。设计1-项集与2-项集的深度剪枝策略,深入地缩小候选模式的搜索空间,减少搜索时间成本与缓存成本。提出挖掘算法的分布式实现方案,通过并行处理进一步降低模式挖掘的时间。基于中等规模与大规模的序列数据集分别进行实验,实验结果表明,该算法有效减少了候选模式的数量,降低了挖掘的时间成本与存储成本,对于大数据集表现出较好的可扩展能力与稳定性。     

Mining web access patterns with super-pattern constraint

We consider the problem of mining web access patterns with super-pattern constraint. This constraint requires that the sequential patterns in the sequence database must contain a particular set of patterns as sub-patterns. One common application of this constraint is web usage mining which mines the user access behavior on the web. In this paper, we introduce an efficient strategy for mining web access patterns with super-pattern constraint that requires only one database scan. Firstly, we present the MWAPC (M ining W eb A ccess P atterns based on super-pattern C onstraint) algorithm, in which each frequent pattern has to be checked if it contains at least one pattern from a user-defined set of patterns. Then we develop an effective algorithm, called EMWAPC that prunes the search space at the beginning of mining process and avoids checking the constraints one by one based on three proposed propositions. We have conducted the experiments on real web log databases. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithms outperform the previous methods.     

A continuous ant colony system framework for fuzzy data mining

The goal of data mining is to find out interesting and meaningful patterns from large databases. In some real applications, many data are quantitative and linguistic. Fuzzy data mining was thus proposed to discover fuzzy knowledge from this kind of data. In the past, two mining algorithms based on the ant colony systems were proposed to find suitable membership functions for fuzzy association rules. They transformed the problem into a multi-stage graph, with each route representing a possible set of membership functions, and then, used the any colony system to solve it. They, however, searched for solutions in a discrete solution space in which the end points of membership functions could be adjusted only in a discrete way. The paper, thus, extends the original approaches to continuous search space, and a fuzzy mining algorithm based on the continuous ant approach is proposed. The end points of the membership functions may be moved in the continuous real-number space. The encoding representation and the operators are also designed for being suitable in the continuous space, such that the actual global optimal solution is contained in the search space. Besides, the proposed approach does not have fixed edges and nodes in the search process. It can dynamically produce search edges according to the distribution functions of pheromones in the solution space. Thus, it can get a better nearly global optimal solution than the previous two ant-based fuzzy mining approaches. The experimental results show the good performance of the proposed approach as well.     

Upgrading a Granular Computing Based Data Mining Framework to a Relational Case

One of the popular methods to develop an algorithm for mining data stored in a relational structure is to upgrade an existing attribute‐value algorithm to a relational case. Current approaches to this problem have some shortcomings such as (1) a dependence on the upgrading process of the algorithm to be extended, (2) complicated redefinitions of crucial notions (e.g., pattern generality, pattern refinement), and (3) a tolerant limitation of the search space for pattern discovery. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a general methodology for upgrading a data mining framework to a relational case. This methodology is defined in a granular computing environment. Thanks to our relational extension of a granular computing based data mining framework, the three above problems can be overcome.     

Mining sequential patterns with regular expression constraints

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 sequential pattern mining systems provide users with only a very restricted mechanism (based on minimum support) for specifying patterns of interest. As a consequence, the pattern mining process is typically characterized by lack of focus and users often end up paying inordinate computational costs just to be inundated with an overwhelming number of useless results. 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 consTraints) 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 trade-offs that arise when constraints that do not subscribe to nice properties (like anti monotonicity) are integrated into the mining process     

Efficient representative pattern mining based on weight and maximality conditions

As a core area in data mining, frequent pattern (or itemset) mining has been studied for a long time. Weighted frequent pattern mining prunes unimportant patterns and maximal frequent pattern mining discovers compact frequent patterns. These approaches contribute to improving mining performance by reducing the search space. However, we need to consider both the downward closure property and patterns' subset checking process when integrating these different methods in order to prevent unintended pattern losses. Moreover, it is also essential to extract valid patterns with faster runtime and less memory consumption. For this reason, in this paper, we propose more efficient maximal weighted frequent pattern (MWFP) mining approaches based on tree and array structures. We describe how to handle these problems more efficiently, maintaining the correctness of our method. We develop two types of maximal weighted frequent mining algorithms based on weight ascending order and support descending order and compare these two algorithms to conclude which is more suitable for MWFP mining. In addition, comprehensive tests in this paper show that our algorithms are more efficient and scalable than state‐of‐the‐art algorithms, and they also have the correctness of the MWFP mining in terms of their pattern generation results.     

Exploiting highly qualified pattern with frequency and weight occupancy

By identifying useful knowledge embedded in the behavior of search engines, users can provide valuable information for web searching and data mining. Numerous algorithms have been proposed to find the desired interesting patterns, i.e., frequent pattern, in real-world applications. Most of those studies use frequency to measure the interestingness of patterns. However, each object may have different importance in these real-world applications, and the frequent ones do not usually contain a large portion of the desired patterns. In this paper, we present a novel method, called exploiting highly qualified patterns with frequency and weight occupancy (QFWO), to suggest the possible highly qualified patterns that utilize the idea of co-occurrence and weight occupancy. By considering item weight, weight occupancy and the frequency of patterns, in this paper, we designed a new highly qualified patterns. A novel Set-enumeration tree called the frequency-weight (FW)-tree and two compact data structures named weight-list and FW-table are designed to hold the global downward closure property and partial downward closure property of quality and weight occupancy to further prune the search space. The proposed method can exploit high qualified patterns in a recursive manner without candidate generation. Extensive experiments were conducted both on real-world and synthetic datasets to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm. Results demonstrate that the obtained patterns are reasonable and acceptable. Moreover, the designed QFWO with several pruning strategies is quite efficient in terms of runtime and search space.     

gBoost: a mathematical programming approach to graph classification and regression

Graph mining methods enumerate frequently appearing subgraph patterns, which can be used as features for subsequent classification or regression. However, frequent patterns are not necessarily informative for the given learning problem. We propose a mathematical programming boosting method (gBoost) that progressively collects informative patterns. Compared to AdaBoost, gBoost can build the prediction rule with fewer iterations. To apply the boosting method to graph data, a branch-and-bound pattern search algorithm is developed based on the DFS code tree. The constructed search space is reused in later iterations to minimize the computation time. Our method can learn more efficiently than the simpler method based on frequent substructure mining, because the output labels are used as an extra information source for pruning the search space. Furthermore, by engineering the mathematical program, a wide range of machine learning problems can be solved without modifying the pattern search algorithm.     

Web使用信息挖掘综述

Web使用信息挖掘可以帮助我们更好地理解Web和Web用户访问模式,这对于开发Web的最大经济潜力是非常关键的。一般来说,使用信息挖掘包含三个阶段：数据预处理,模式发现和模式分析。文章以这三个阶段为PWeb框架,分别介绍了数据预处理的技术与困难,Web使用信息挖掘中常用的方法和算法,以及主要应用。