Mining Patterns Using Relaxations of User Defined Constraints

Abstract

Abstract. The main drawbacks of sequential pattern mining have been its lack of focus on user expectations and the high number of discovered patterns. However, the solution commonly accepted – the use of constraints – approximates the mining process to a hypothesis-testing task. In this paper, we propose a new methodology to mine sequential patterns, keeping the focus on user expectations, without compromising the discovery of unknown patterns. Our methodology is based on the use of constraint relaxations, and it consists on using them to filter accepted patterns during the mining process. We propose a hierarchy of relaxations, applied to constraints expressed as context-free languages. 1