RETRACTED: Discovery of Characteristic Sequential Patterns Based on Two Types of Constraints

Abstract

This article proposes a method for discovering characteristic sequential patterns from sequential data by using background knowledge. In the case of the tabular structured data, each item is composed of an attribute and an attribute value. This article focuses on two types of constraints describing background knowledge. The first one is time constraints. It can flexibly describe relationships related to the time between items. The second one is item constraints, it can select items included in sequential patterns. These constraints can represent the background knowledge representing the interests of analysts. Therefore, they can easily discover sequential patterns coinciding the interests as characteristic sequential patterns. Lastly, this article verifies the effect of the pattern discovery method based on both the evaluation criteria of sequential patterns and the background knowledge. The method can be applied to the analysis of the healthcare data.