Mining multidimensional and multilevel sequential patterns

Abstract

Multidimensional databases have been designed to provide decision makers with the necessary tools to help them understand their data. This framework is different from transactional data as the datasets contain huge volumes of historicized and aggregated data defined over a set of dimensions that can be arranged through multiple levels of granularities. Many tools have been proposed to query the data and navigate through the levels of granularity. However, automatic tools are still missing to mine this type of data in order to discover regular specific patterns. In this article, we present a method for mining sequential patterns from multidimensional databases, at the same time taking advantage of the different dimensions and levels of granularity, which is original compared to existing work. The necessary definitions and algorithms are extended from regular sequential patterns to this particular case. Experiments are reported, showing the significance of this approach.