A pattern growth-based sequential pattern mining algorithm called prefixSuffixSpan

Abstract

Sequential pattern mining is an important data mining problem widely addressed by the data mining community, with a very large field of applications. The sequence pattern mining aims at extracting a set of attributes, shared across time among a large number of objects in a given database. The work presented in this paper is directed towards the general theoretical foundations of the pattern-growth approach. It helps indepth understanding of the pattern-growth approach, current status of provided solutions, and direction of research in this area. In this paper, this study is carried out on a particular class of pattern-growth algorithms for which patterns are grown by making grow either the current pattern prefix or the current pattern suffix from the same position at each growth-step. This study leads to a new algorithm called prefixSuffixSpan. Its correctness is proven and experimentations are performed.