Identifying and structuring service functions of mobile applications in Google’s Android Market

Abstract

Recently, mobile applications are considered one of the most opportune issues in mobile industry since the explosive growth of mobile applications has generated the myriad of service functions. In response, it is needed to extract useful information on dominant service functions and structural relationship among the service functions. However, there have been few methods for encapsulating information on major service functions and their relationships. Thus, this study aims at identifying dominant service functions and their structural relationships of mobile applications in Google’s Android Market using frequent pattern (FP)-tree algorithm which retrieves and summarizes frequently used items according to association rules. In this study, the FP-tree algorithm is used for extracting information on service functions in terms of three factors: frequency, association, and hierarchical structure. Using the information of service function tree, the developers refer the systematic and mash-up combinations of service functions to design new mobile applications.