EpisodeSupport: A Global Constraint for Mining Frequent Patterns in a Long Sequence of Events

Quentin Cappart, John O. R. Aoga, Pierre Schaus

Abstract: The number of applications generating sequential data is exploding. This work studies the discovering of frequent patterns in a large sequence of events, possibly time-stamped. This problem is known as the Frequent Episode Mining (FEM). Similarly to the mining problems recently tackled by Constraint Programming (CP), FEM would also benefit from the modularity offered by CP to accommodate easily additional constraints on the patterns. These advantages do not offer a guarantee of efficiency. Therefore, we introduce two global constraints for solving FEM problems with or without time consideration. The time-stamped version can accommodate gap and span constraints on the matched sequences. Our experiments on real data sets of different levels of complexity show that the introduced constraints is competitive with the state-of-the-art methods in terms of execution time and memory consumption while offering the flexibility of adding constraints on the patterns.