FCloSM, FGenSM: two efficient algorithms for mining frequent closed and generator sequences using the local pruning strategy

摘要

Mining frequent sequences in sequential databases are highly valuable for many real-life applications. However, in several cases, especially when databases are huge and when low minimum support thresholds are used, the cardinality of the result set can be enormous. Consequently, algorithms for discovering frequent sequences exhibit poor performance, showing an important increase in execution time, memory consumption and storage space usage. To address this issue, researchers have studied the tasks of mining frequent closed and generator sequences, as they provide several benefits when compared to the set of frequent sequences. One of the most important benefits is that the cardinalities of frequent closed and generator sequences are generally much less than the cardinality of frequent sequences. Hence, humans find it more convenient to analyze the information provided by closed and generator sequences. Moreover, it was shown that frequent closed sequences have the advantage of being lossless, and they thus preserve information about the frequency of all frequent subsequences, while generator sequences can provide higher accuracy for sequence classification tasks since they are the smallest patterns that characterize groups of sequences. Besides, frequent closed sequences can be combined with generators to produce non-redundant sequential rules and recover the complete set of frequent sequences and their frequencies. This paper proposes two novel algorithms named FCloSM and FGenSM to mine frequent closed and generator sequences efficiently. These algorithms are based on new pruning conditions called extended early elimination (3E) and early pruning techniques named EPCLO and EPGEN, designed to identify non-closed and non-generator patterns early. Based on these techniques, two local pruning strategies called LPCLO and LPGEN are proposed to eliminate non-closed and non-generator patterns more efficiently at two successive levels of the prefix search tree without performing subsequence relation checking. These theoretical results, which are the basis of FCloSM and FGenSM, are mathematically proved and are shown to be more general than those presented in previous work. Extensive experiments show that FCloSM and FGenSM are one to two orders of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art algorithms for discovering frequent closed sequences (CloSpan, BIDE, ClaSP and CM-ClaSP) and for mining frequent generators (FEAT, FSGP and VGEN), and that FCloSM and FGenSM consume much less memory.