Business Intelligence

Software and
Techniques
BUAN6324/MIS6324
Spring, 2016 Gregory G. MacDonald, PhD
(Lecture #6b)

Agenda
Project selection and expectations
No paper
Powerpoint presentation ~ 10-15 minutes
Describe dataset, what you did in the data prep phase,
methods considered, challenges encountered, model
evaluation, insights.

Sequential Pattern Mining

Mid-Term Review

Basis for this lecture is:

http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~kumar/dmbook/ch7.pdf
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Sequential Pattern Mining

Considers a sequence of transactions in
time and not just one shopping trip,
temporal dimension
Patterns may consist of elements that
may not be continuous in time, possible
to use extracted patterns to predict the
future
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Sequence Data
Sequence is an ordered list of
elements, elements are made up of
one or more events (items)

Could be customer,
sensor, server, etc
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Sequence Definition

Lets Check
Object
A
A
A
B

timestamp elements
10
{1},{2,3},{4}
20
{5}
30
{6},{7}
10
{4,5,6},{1}

3 elements, and
4 events (items)
Sequence

Length of the A sequence is 6 (6 elements), with 7 events

Sequence Examples

How many
elements? Events
(items) ?

Subsequence Definition

Subsequence Definition

The Task

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The Task

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The Task

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The Task

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Extracting Sequential
Patterns

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Note
* The number of candidate subsequences is substantially
greater than the number of candidate itemsets (from market
basket)
* An item can appear at most once in an itemset, but an event
can appear more than once in a sequence given two items a,b
only one 2-itemset can be generated but there are many
?
candidate 2-subsequences <{a,b}>, <{a}, {b}>, <{b,a}>,
<{b},{a}>
* Order matters in a subsequence but not for itemsets {1,2}
and {2,1} refers to the same itemset but are different
subsequences (temporal consideration)
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Sequence Generation (GSP)

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Timing Constraints
Maxspan specifies the maximum allowed time difference
between the latest and the earliest occurrences of events in
the entire subsequence
Affects support count
Large maxspan may detect spurious patterns
?
Maxgap maximum time difference between two consecutive
elements of a subsequence (not events/items but elements)
Mingap minimum time difference between two consecutive
elements of a subsequence (again, not events/items but
elements)
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Timing Constraints

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Timing Constraints

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Timing Constraints

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Quiz!

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Quiz!

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R
Package arulesSequences

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Mid-Term Review
See eLearning midterm guide

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