P-N-RMiner: a generic framework for mining interesting structured relational patterns

Abstract

Methods for local pattern mining are fragmented along two dimensions: the pattern syntax, and the data types on which they are applicable. Pattern syntaxes include subgroups, n-sets, itemsets, and many more; common data types include binary, categorical, and real-valued. Recent research on relational pattern mining has shown how the aforementioned pattern syntaxes can be unified in a single framework. However, a unified model to deal with various data types is lacking, certainly for more complexly structured types such as real numbers, time of day—which is circular—, geographical location, terms from a taxonomy, etc. We introduce P-N-RMiner, a generic tool for mining interesting local patterns in (relational) data with structured attributes. We show how to handle the attribute structures in a generic manner, by modelling them as partial orders. We also derive an information-theoretic subjective interestingness measure for such patterns and present an algorithm to efficiently enumerate the patterns. We find that (1) P-N-RMiner finds patterns that are substantially more informative, (2) the new interestingness measure cannot be approximated using existing methods, and (3) we can leverage the partial orders to speed up enumeration.