A CP-based approach for mining sequential patterns with quantities

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of mining sequential patterns (SPM) from data represented as a set of sequences. In this work, we are interested in sequences of items in which each item is associated with its quantity. To the best of our knowledge, existing approaches don’t allow to handle this kind of sequences under constraints. In the other hand, several proposals show the efficiency of constraint programming (CP) to solve SPM problem dealing with several kind of constraints. However, in this paper, we propose the global constraint QSPM which is an extension of the two CP-based approaches proposed in [5] and [7]. Experiments on real-life datasets show the efficiency of our approach allowing to specify many constraints like size, membership and regular expression constraints.

Keywords

• Sequential pattern mining, quantitative sequences, constraint programming, constraints.