A fuzzy data mining algorithm for incremental mining of quantitative sequential patterns

In real world applications, the databases are constantly added with a large number of transactions and hence maintaining latest sequential patterns valid on the updated database is crucial. Existing data mining algorithms can incrementally mine the sequential patterns from databases with binary values. Temporal transactions with quantitative values are commonly seen in real world applications. In addition, several methods have been proposed for representing uncertain data in a database. In this paper, a fuzzy data mining algorithm for incremental mining of sequential patterns from quantitative databases is proposed. Proposed algorithm called IQSP algorithm uses the fuzzy grid notion to generate fuzzy sequential patterns validated on the updated database containing the transactions in the original database and in the incremental database. It uses the information about sequential patterns that are already mined from original database and avoids start-from-scratch process. Also, it minimizes the number of candidates to check as well as number of scans to original database by identifying the potential sequences in incremental database.