PRESS: A personalised approach for mining top-k groups of objects with subspace similarity

Personalised analytics is a powerful technology that can be used to improve the career, lifestyle, and health of individuals by providing them with an in-depth analysis of their characteristics as compared to other people. Existing research has often focused on mining general patterns or clusters, but without the facility for customisation to an individual’s needs. It is challenging to adapt such approaches to the personalised case, due to the high computational overhead they require for discovering patterns that are good across an entire dataset, rather than with respect to an individual. In this paper, we tackle the challenge of personalised pattern mining and propose a query-driven approach to mine objects with subspace similarity. Given a query object in a categorical dataset, our proposed algorithm, PRESS (Personalised Subspace Similarity), determines the top-k groups of objects, where each group has high similarity to the query for some particular subspace. We evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach on both synthetic and real datasets.