A Novel Approach for Mining Closed Clickstream Patterns

Abstract

Closed sequential pattern (CSP) mining is an optimization technique in sequential pattern mining because they produce more compact representations. Additionally, the runtime and memory usage required for mining CSPs is much lower than the sequential pattern mining. This task has fascinated numerous researchers. In this study, we propose a novel approach for closed clickstream pattern mining using C-List (CCPC) data structure. Closed clickstream pattern mining is a more specific task of CSP mining that has been lacking in research investment; nevertheless, it has promising applications in various fields. CCPC consists of two key steps: It initially builds the SPPC-tree and the C-List for each frequent 1-pattern and then determines all frequently closed clickstream 1-patterns; next, it constructs the C-List for each frequent k-pattern and mines the remaining frequently closed k-patterns. The proposed method is optimized by modifying the SPPC-tree structure and a new property is added into each node element in both the SPPC-tree and C-Lists to quickly prune nonclosed clickstream. Experimental results conducted on several datasets show that the proposed method is better than the previous techniques and improves the runtime and memory usage in most cases, especially when using low minimum support thresholds on the huge databases.

Keywords:

• C-List
• clickstream pattern mining
• closed pattern
• SPPC-tree

Notes

1 The executed code was provided by the authors.

2 http://www.philippe-fournier-viger.com/spmf/index.php?link=datasets.php

Additional information

Funding

This research is funded by Vietnam National Foundation for Science and Technology Development (NAFOSTED) under grant number 02/2019/TN.