e-NSPFI: Efficient Mining Negative Sequential Pattern from Both Frequent and Infrequent Positive Sequential Patterns

Abstract

Negative sequential patterns (NSPs), which focus on nonoccurring but interesting behaviors (e.g. missing consumption records), provide a special perspective of analyzing sequential patterns. So far, very few methods have been proposed to solve for NSP mining problem, and these methods only mine NSP from positive sequential patterns (PSPs). However, as many useful negative association rules are mined from infrequent itemsets, many meaningful NSPs can also be found from infrequent positive sequences (IPSs). The challenge of mining NSP from IPS is how to constrain which IPS could be available used during NSP process because, if without constraints, the number of IPS would be too large to be handled. So in this study, we first propose a strategy to constrain which IPS could be available and utilized for mining NSP. Then we give a storage optimization method to hold this IPS information. Finally, an efficient algorithm called Efficient mining Negative Sequential Pattern from both Frequent and Infrequent positive sequential patterns (e-NSPFI) is proposed for mining NSP. The experimental results show that e-NSPFI can efficiently find much more interesting negative patterns than e-NSP.