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Process discovery is the learning task that entails the construction of process models from event logs of information systems. Typically, these event logs are large data sets that contain the process executions by registering what activity has taken place at a certain moment in time. By far the most arduous challenge for process discovery algorithms consists of tackling the problem of accurate and comprehensible knowledge discovery from highly flexible environments. Event logs from such flexible systems often contain a large variety of process executions which makes the application of process mining most interesting. However, simply applying existing process discovery techniques will often yield highly incomprehensible process models because of their inaccuracy and complexity. With respect to resolving this problem, trace clustering is one very interesting approach since it allows to split up an existing event log so as to facilitate the knowledge discovery process. In this paper, we propose a novel trace clustering technique that significantly differs from previous approaches. Above all, it starts from the observation that currently available techniques suffer from a large divergence between the clustering bias and the evaluation bias. By employing an active learning inspired approach, this bias divergence is solved. In an assessment using four complex, real-life event logs, it is shown that our technique significantly outperforms currently available trace clustering techniques.

Many data mining techniques have been proposed for mining useful patterns in text documents. However, how to effectively use and update discovered patterns is still an open research issue, especially in the domain of text mining. Since most existing text mining methods adopted term-based approaches, they all suffer from the problems of polysemy and synonymy. Over the years, people have often held the hypothesis that pattern (or phrase)-based approaches should perform better than the term-based ones, but many experiments do not support this hypothesis. This paper presents an innovative and effective pattern discovery technique which includes the processes of pattern deploying and pattern evolving, to improve the effectiveness of using and updating discovered patterns for finding relevant and interesting information. Substantial experiments on RCV1 data collection and TREC topics demonstrate that the proposed solution achieves encouraging performance.

The importance of data mining is apparent with the advent of powerful data collection and storage tools; raw data is so abundant that manual analysis is no longer possible. Unfortunately, data mining problems are difficult to solve and this prompted the introduction of several novel data structures to improve mining efficiency. Here, we critically examine existing preprocessing data structures used in association rule mining for enhancing performance in an attempt to understand their strengths and weaknesses. Our analyses culminate in a practical structure called the SOTrielT (support-ordered trie itemset) and two synergistic algorithms to accompany it for the fast discovery of frequent itemsets. Experiments involving a wide range of synthetic data sets reveal that its algorithms outperform FP-growth, a recent association rule mining algorithm with excellent performance, by up to two orders of magnitude and, thus, verifying its' efficiency and viability.

Two new structures for association rule mining (ARM), the T-tree, and the P-tree, together with associated algorithms, are described. The authors demonstrate that the structures and algorithms offer significant advantages in terms of storage and execution time.

Association and classification are two important tasks in data mining and knowledge discovery. Intensive studies have been carried out in both areas. But, how to apply discovered event associations to classification is still seldom found in current publications. Trying to bridge this gap, this paper extends our previous paper on significant event association discovery to classification. We propose to use weight of evidence to evaluate the evidence of a significant event association in support of, or against, a certain class membership. Traditional weight of evidence in information theory is extended here to measure the event associations of different orders with respect to a certain class. After the discovery of significant event associations inherent in a data set, it is easy and efficient to apply the weight of evidence measure for classifying an observation according to any attribute. With this approach, we achieve flexible prediction.

Various tools and systems for knowledge discovery and data mining have been developed and are available for applications. However, when there are many databases, an immediate question is where one should start mining. It is not true that data mining is better the more databases there are. It is only true when the databases involved are relevant to the task at hand. By breaking away from the conventional data mining assumption that many databases should be joined into one, we argue that the first step for multidatabase mining is to identify databases that are most relevant to an application; without doing so, the mining process can be lengthy, aimless, and ineffective. A measure of relevance is thus proposed for mining tasks with the objective of finding patterns or regularities of certain attributes. An efficient algorithm for identifying relevant databases is described. Experiments are conducted to verify the measure's performance and to exemplify its application.