Mining Top-k High Average-Utility Sequential Patterns for Resource Transformation

High-utility sequential pattern mining (HUSPM) helps researchers find all subsequences that have high utility in a quantitative sequential database. The HUSPM approach appears to be well suited for resource transformation in DIKWP graphs. However, all the extensions of a high-utility sequential pattern (HUSP) also have a high utility that increases with its length. Therefore, it is difficult to obtain diverse patterns of resources. The patterns that consist of many low-utility items can also be a HUSP. In practice, such a long pattern is difficult to analyze. In addition, the low-utility items do not always reflect the interestingness of association rules. High average-utility pattern mining is considered a solution to extract more significant patterns by considering the lengths of patterns. In this paper, we formulate the problem of top-k high average-utility sequential pattern mining (HAUSPM) and propose a novel algorithm for resource transformation. We adopt a projection mechanism to improve efficiency. We also adopt the sequence average-utility-raising strategy to increase thresholds. We design the prefix extension average utility and the reduced sequence average utility by incorporating the average utility into the utility upper bounds. The results of our comparative experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve sufficiently good performance.