We are given a large database of customer transactions, where each transaction consists of customer-id, transaction time, and the items bought in the transaction. We introduce the problem of mining sequential patterns over such databases. We present three algorithms to solve this problem, and empirically evaluate their performance using synthetic data. Two of the proposed algorithms, AprioriSome and AprioriAll, have comparable performance, albeit AprioriSome performs a little better when the minimum number of customers that must support a sequential pattern is low. Scale-up experiments show that both AprioriSome and AprioriAll scale linearly with the number of customer transactions. They also have excellent scale-up properties with respect to the number of transactions per customer and the number of items in a transaction. >

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Mining sequential patterns

The problem of mining sequential patterns was recently introduced in [3] We are given a database of sequences, where each sequence is a list of transactions ordered by transaction-time, and each transaction is a set of items The problem is to discover all sequential patterns with a user-specified minimum support, where the support of a pattern is the number of data-sequences that contain the pattern An example of a sequential pattern is“5% of customers bought ‘Foundation’ and ‘Ringworld’ in one transaction, followed by ‘Second Foundation’ in a later transaction” We generalize the problem as follows First, we add time constraints that specify a minimum and/or maximum time period between adjacent elements in a pattern Second, we relax the restriction that the items in an element of a sequential pattern must come from the same transaction, instead allowing the items to be present in a set of transactions whose transaction-times are within a user-specified time window Third, given a user-defined taxonomy (is-a hierarchy) on items, we allow sequential patterns to include items across all levels of the taxonomy

Mining Sequential Patterns: Generalizations and Performance Improvements

We survey the current techniques to cope with the problem of string matching that allows errors. This is becoming a more and more relevant issue for many fast growing areas such as information retrieval and computational biology. We focus on online searching and mostly on edit distance, explaining the problem and its relevance, its statistical behavior, its history and current developments, and the central ideas of the algorithms and their complexities. We present a number of experiments to compare the performance of the different algorithms and show which are the best choices. We conclude with some directions for future work and open problems.

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A guided tour to approximate string matching

We propose an indexing method for time sequences for processing similarity queries. We use the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) to map time sequences to the frequency domain, the crucial observation being that, for most sequences of practical interest, only the first few frequencies are strong. Another important observation is Parseval's theorem, which specifies that the Fourier transform preserves the Euclidean distance in the time or frequency domain. Having thus mapped sequences to a lower-dimensionality space by using only the first few Fourier coefficients, we use R * -trees to index the sequences and efficiently answer similarity queries. We provide experimental results which show that our method is superior to search based on sequential scanning. Our experiments show that a few coefficients (1–3) are adequate to provide good performance. The performance gain of our method increases with the number and length of sequences.

/pdf/efficient-similarity-search-in-sequence-databases-1j92qk9o7x.pdf

Efficient Similarity Search In Sequence Databases

Often, in the real world, entities have two or more representations in databases. Duplicate records do not share a common key and/or they contain errors that make duplicate matching a difficult task. Errors are introduced as the result of transcription errors, incomplete information, lack of standard formats, or any combination of these factors. In this paper, we present a thorough analysis of the literature on duplicate record detection. We cover similarity metrics that are commonly used to detect similar field entries, and we present an extensive set of duplicate detection algorithms that can detect approximately duplicate records in a database. We also cover multiple techniques for improving the efficiency and scalability of approximate duplicate detection algorithms. We conclude with coverage of existing tools and with a brief discussion of the big open problems in the area

/pdf/duplicate-record-detection-a-survey-4crkywvv1d.pdf

Duplicate Record Detection: A Survey

T h e string-matching problem is a very c o m m o n problem. We are searching for a string P = PtP2. . "Pro i n s i d e a la rge t ex t f i le T = t l t2. . . t . , b o t h sequences of characters from a f i n i t e character set Z. T h e characters may be English characters in a text file, DNA base pairs, lines of source code, angles between edges in polygons, machines or machine parts in a production schedule, music notes and tempo in a musical score, and so fo r th . We w a n t to f i n d a l l occurrences of P i n T; n a m e l y , we are searching for the set of starting posit ions F = {i[1 --i--n m + 1 s u c h t h a t titi+ l " " t i + m 1 = P } " T h e two most famous algorithms for this problem are t h e B o y e r M o o r e algorithm [3] and t h e K n u t h Morris Pratt algorithm [10]. There are many extensions to t h i s problem; for example, we may be looking for a set of patterns, a pattern w i t h "wi ld cards," or a regular expression. String-matching tools are included in every reasonable text editor, word processor, and many other applications.

Sun Wu

Papers

Fast text searching: allowing errors