First-order temporal pattern mining with regular expression constraints

Previous studies on mining sequential patterns have focused on temporal patterns specified by some form of propositional temporal logic. However, there are some interesting sequential patterns, such as the multi-sequential patterns, whose specification needs a more expressive formalism, the first-order temporal logic. Multi-sequential patterns appear in different application contexts, for instance in spatial census data mining, which is the target application of the study developed in this paper. We extend a well-known user-controlled tool, based on regular expressions constraints, to the multi-sequential pattern context. This specification tool enables the incorporation of user focus into the mining process. We present MSP-Miner, an Apriori-based algorithm to discover all frequent multi-sequential patterns satisfying a user-specified regular expression constraint.