Sequential pattern mining in databases with temporal uncertainty

Abstract

Temporally uncertain data widely exist in many real-world applications. Temporal uncertainty can be caused by various reasons such as conflicting or missing event timestamps, network latency, granularity mismatch, synchronization problems, device precision limitations, data aggregation. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm to mine sequential patterns from data with temporal uncertainty. We propose an uncertain model in which timestamps are modeled by random variables and then design a new approach to manage temporal uncertainty. We integrate it into the pattern-growth sequential pattern mining algorithm to discover probabilistic frequent sequential patterns. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real datasets prove that the proposed algorithm is both efficient and scalable.