A model of concept hierarchy-based diverse patterns with applications to recommender system

Abstract

Frequent pattern mining is one among the popular data mining techniques. Frequent pattern mining approaches extract interesting associations among the items in a given transactional database. The items of the transactional database can be organized as a concept hierarchy. Notably, frequent pattern mining does not distinguish the patterns by analyzing the categories of the items in a given concept hierarchy. In several applications, it is often useful to distinguish among the frequent patterns by analyzing how the items of the pattern are mapped to different categories of the concept hierarchy. In this paper, we propose a new interestingness measure, designated as diversity rank (drank), for capturing the diversity of a given pattern by analyzing the extent to which the items of the pattern are associated with the categories of the corresponding concept hierarchy. Given a transactional database over a set I of items and the corresponding concept hierarchy on I, we propose a methodology to compute the drank of the given pattern. Furthermore, by extending the notion of drank, we propose an approach to improve the diversity and accuracy of association rule-based recommender system. The results of our performance evaluation on the real-world MovieLens dataset demonstrate that the proposed diversity model extracts different kinds of patterns as compared to frequent patterns. Furthermore, our proposed recommender system approach improves the diversity performance w.r.t. the existing association rule-based recommender system without significantly compromising the accuracy. Overall, the proposed concept hierarchy-based diverse pattern model provides a scope to develop new approaches for improving the performance of frequent pattern mining-based applications.