Learning Temporal Association Rules on Symbolic Time Sequences

We introduce a temporal pattern model called Temporal Interval Tree Association Rules (Tita rules or Titar). This pattern model can express both uncertainty and temporal inaccuracy of temporal events. Among other things, Tita rules can express the usual time point operators, synchronicity, order, and chaining, as well as temporal negation and disjunctive temporal constraints. Using this representation, we present the Titar learner algorithm that can be used to extract Tita rules from large datasets expressed as Symbolic Time Sequences. The selection of temporal constraints (or time-frames) is at the core of the temporal learning. Our learning algorithm is based on two novel approaches for this problem. This first one is designed to select temporal constraints for the head of temporal association rules. The second selects temporal constraints for the body of such rules. We discuss the evaluation of probabilistic temporal association rules, evaluate our technique with two experiments, introduce a metric to evaluate sets of temporal rules, compare the results with two other approaches and discuss the results.