Mining Interesting Useful Patterns

频繁模式挖掘是一项重要的数据挖掘任务，用于发现频繁共存的项目集。许多现有的算法从精确的数据（例如，超市交易）中发现频繁的模式，其中数据集的内容是精确已知的。然而，在现实生活中，由于遗传测量不准确性或采样频率等因素，数据不精确或不确定（例如，传感器数据、医疗测试结果）。尽管存在不确定性，但这些数据包含了一套丰富的有用知识。在过去的几年里，我开发了一种算法，使用概率方法从不确定的数据中找到频繁的模式，其中每个交易中的项目都被假设为独立的。然而，这种假设在现实生活中可能并不成立。因此，我提出了一个研究计划，其目标是构建一个探索性的、高效的、用户友好的和强大的挖掘框架——它由从数据流和/或不确定数据中挖掘用户感兴趣的有用模式的系统组成。具体来说，我打算

Frequent pattern mining is an important data mining task that finds sets of frequently co-occurring items. Many existing algorithms find frequent patterns from precise data (e.g., supermarket transactions), in which the contents of datasets are precisely known. However, there are real-life situations in which data are imprecise or uncertain (e.g., sensor data, medical test results) due to factors like inherited measurement inaccuracies or sampling frequency. Despite their uncertainty, these data contain a rich set of useful knowledge. Over the past few years, I have developed algorithms that use probabilistic approaches to find frequent patterns from uncertain data, in which items in each transaction are assumed to be independent. However, this assumption may not hold in many real-life situations. Hence, I propose a research program with an objective to build an exploratory, efficient, user-friendly, and powerful mining framework--which consists of systems that mine useful patterns that are interesting to users from data streams and/or uncertain data. Specifically, I plan to (i) explore non-probabilistic approaches in finding frequent patterns, (ii) relax the above assumption so as to handle more realistic situations where items in each uncertain transaction may be related, (iii) incorporate user preferences in the mining process so as to allow users to find other useful (frequent or infrequent) patterns that are interesting to users, (iv) further improve performance so as to provide users with real-time responses, (v) develop visual analytics tools so as to enable users to visualize and analyze static (or dynamic) datasets of precise (or uncertain) data. Consequently, for this proposed research program, I and my HQP would develop new data mining technology for mining interesting useful patterns. This, in turn, advances knowledge of researchers in the field. Moreover, I also plan to apply the proposed system to various real-life applications (e.g., mining Web data, telecommunication data, agro-meteorological data, and tweets from social networks) so as to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed systems in addressing scientific/business needs of the application users when mining interesting useful patterns.