Multi-level Sequence Mining Based on GSP

Mining sequential patterns is an important problem in the field of data mining and many algorithms and optimization techniques have been published to deal with that problem. The GSP algorithm, which is one of them, can be used for mining sequential patterns with some additional constraints. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for mining multi-level sequential patterns based on GSP. The idea is that if a more general item appears in a pattern, the pattern has higher or at least the same support as the one containing the corresponding specific item. However, too generalized sequence patterns are not important for user. In our algorithm generalization uses a selective method based on information content of patterns. This allows us to mine more patterns with the same minimal support threshold and to reveal new potentially useful patterns.