Mining Frequent Seasonal Gradual Patterns

Gradual patterns that capture co-variation of complex attributes in the form “when X increases/decreases, Y increases/decreases” play an important role in many real world applications where huge volumes of complex numerical data must be handled. More recently, they have received attention from the data mining community for exploring temporal data and methods have been defined to automatically extract gradual patterns from temporal data. However, to the best of our knowledge, no method has been proposed to extract gradual patterns that always appear at the identical time intervals in the sequences of temporal data, despite the knowledge that such patterns may bring for certain applications such as e-commerce. This paper proposes to extract co-variations of periodically repeating attributes from the sequences of temporal data that we call seasonal gradual patterns. We discuss the specific features of these patterns and propose an approach for their extraction by exploiting a motif mining algorithm in a sequence, and justify its applicability to the gradual case. Illustrative results obtained from a real world data set are described and show the interest for such patterns.