Weighted frequent sequential pattern mining

Trillions of bytes of data are generated every day in different forms, and extracting useful information from that massive amount of data is the study of data mining. Sequential pattern mining is a major branch of data mining that deals with mining frequent sequential patterns from sequence databases. Due to items having different importance in real-life scenarios, they cannot be treated uniformly. With today’s datasets, the use of weights in sequential pattern mining is much more feasible. In most cases, as in real-life datasets, pushing weights will give a better understanding of the dataset, as it will also measure the importance of an item inside a pattern rather than treating all the items equally. Many techniques have been introduced to mine weighted sequential patterns, but typically these algorithms generate a massive number of candidate patterns and take a long time to execute. This work aims to introduce a new pruning technique and a complete framework that takes much less time and generates a small number of candidate sequences without compromising with completeness. Performance evaluation on real-life datasets shows that our proposed approach can mine weighted patterns substantially faster than other existing approaches.