Mining Association Rules in Long Sequences

Discovering interesting patterns in long sequences, and finding confident association rules within them, is a popular area in data mining. Most existing methods define patterns as interesting if they occur frequently enough in a sufficiently cohesive form. Based on these frequent patterns, association rules are mined in the traditional manner. Recently, a new interestingness measure, combining cohesion and frequency of a pattern, has been proposed, and patterns are deemed interesting if encountering one event from the pattern implies with a high probability that the rest of the pattern can be found nearby. It is quite clear that this probability is not necessarily equally high for all the events making up such a pattern, which is why we propose to introduce the concept of association rules into this problem setting. The confidence of such an association rule tells us how far on average from a particular event, or a set of events, one has to look, in order to find the rest of the pattern. In this paper, we present an efficient algorithm to mine such association rules. After applying our method to both synthetic and real-life data, we conclude that it indeed gives intuitive results in a number of applications.