Targeted Sequential Pattern Mining with High Average Utility

Abstract: Incorporating utility into targeted pattern mining can address the practical limitations of traditional frequency-based approaches. However, utility-based methods often suffer from generating a large number of long and complicated sequences. To improve pattern relevance and interpretability, average utility provides a more balanced metric by considering both utility and sequence length. Moreover, incorporating user-defined query targets into the mining process enhances usability and interactivity by retaining only patterns containing user-specified goals. To address challenges related to mining efficiency in large-scale, long-sequence datasets, this study introduces average utility into targeted sequential pattern mining. A novel algorithm, TAUSQ-PG, is designed to find targeted high average utility sequential patterns. It incorporates efficient filtering and pruning strategies, tighter upper bound models, as well as novel specialized evaluation metrics and query flags tailored to this task. Extensive comparative experiments on different datasets demonstrate that TAUSQ-PG effectively controls the candidate set size, thereby reducing redundant sequence generation and significantly improving runtime and memory efficiency.