One-off Negative Sequential Pattern Mining

Negative sequential pattern mining (SPM) is an important SPM research topic. Unlike positive SPM, negative SPM can discover events that should have occurred but have not occurred, and it can be used for financial risk management and fraud detection. However, existing methods generally ignore the repetitions of the pattern and do not consider gap constraints, which can lead to mining results containing a large number of patterns that users are not interested in. To solve this problem, this paper discovers frequent one-off negative sequential patterns (ONPs). This problem has the following two characteristics. First, the support is calculated under the one-off condition, which means that any character in the sequence can only be used once at most. Second, the gap constraint can be given by the user. To efficiently mine patterns, this paper proposes the ONP-Miner algorithm, which employs depth-first and backtracking strategies to calculate the support. Therefore, ONP-Miner can effectively avoid creating redundant nodes and parent-child relationships. Moreover, to effectively reduce the number of candidate patterns, ONP-Miner uses pattern join and pruning strategies to generate and further prune the candidate patterns, respectively. Experimental results show that ONP-Miner not only improves the mining efficiency, but also has better mining performance than the state-of-the-art algorithms. More importantly, ONP mining can find more interesting patterns in traffic volume data to predict future traffic.