Utility Mining Across Multi-Dimensional Sequences

Knowledge extraction from database is the fundamental task in database and data mining community, which has been applied to a wide range of real-world applications and situations. Different from the support-based mining models, the utility-oriented mining framework integrates the utility theory to provide more informative and useful patterns. Time-dependent sequence data are commonly seen in real life. Sequence data have been widely utilized in many applications, such as analyzing sequential user behavior on the Web, influence maximization, route planning, and targeted marketing. Unfortunately, all the existing algorithms lose sight of the fact that the processed data not only contain rich features (e.g., occur quantity, risk, and profit), but also may be associated with multi-dimensional auxiliary information, e.g., transaction sequence can be associated with purchaser profile information. In this article, we first formulate the problem of utility mining across multi-dimensional sequences, and propose a novel framework named MDUS to extract Multi-Dimensional Utility-oriented Sequential useful patterns. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that incorporates the time-dependent sequence-order, quantitative information, utility factor, and auxiliary dimension. Two algorithms respectively named MDUSEM and MDUSSD are presented to address the formulated problem. The former algorithm is based on database transformation, and the later one performs pattern joins and a searching method to identify desired patterns across multi-dimensional sequences. Extensive experiments are carried on six real-life datasets and one synthetic dataset to show that the proposed algorithms can effectively and efficiently discover the useful knowledge from multi-dimensional sequential databases. Moreover, the MDUS framework can provide better insight, and it is more adaptable to real-life situations than the current existing models.