Efficient Discovery of Highly Interrelated Users in One-Way Communications

In this paper, we introduce a new sequential pattern, the Interactive User Sequence Pattern (IUSP). This pattern is useful for grouping highly interrelated users in one-way communications such as e-mail, SMS, etc., especially when the communications include many spam users. Also, we propose an efficient algorithm for discovering IUSPs from massive one-way communication logs containing only the following information: senders, receivers, and dates and times. Even though there is a difficulty in that our new sequential pattern violates the Apriori property, the proposed algorithm shows excellent processing performance and low storage cost in experiments on a real dataset.