No d ’ ordre : 2009 - ISAL - 0036 Année 2009

An inductive database is a database that contains not only data but also patterns. Inductive databases are designed to support the KDD process. Recent advances in inductive databases research have given rise to a generic solvers capable of solving inductive queries that are arbitrary Boolean combinations of anti-monotonic and monotonic constraints. They are designed to mine different types of pattern (i.e., patterns from different pattern languages). An instance of such a generic solver exists that is capable of mining string patterns from string data sets. In our main application, promoter sequence analysis, there is a requirement to handle fault-tolerance, as the data intrinsically contains errors, and the phenomenon we are trying to capture is fundamentally degenerate. Our research contribution to fault-tolerant pattern extraction in string data sets is the use of a generic solver, based on a non-trivial formalisation of fault-tolerant pattern extraction as a constraint-based mining task. We identified the stages in the process of the extraction of such patterns where state-of-art strategies can be applied to prune the search space. We then developed a fault-tolerant pattern match function InsDels that generic constraint solving strategies can soundly tackle. We also focused on making local patterns actionable. The bottleneck of most local pattern extraction methods is the burden of spurious patterns. As the analysis of patterns by the application domain experts is time consuming, we cannot afford to present patterns without any objective clue about their relevancy. Therefore we have developed two methods of computing the expected number of patterns extracted in random data sets. If the number of extracted patterns is strongly different from the expected number from random data sets, one can then state that the results exhibits local associations that are a priori relevant because they are unexpected. Among others applications, we have applied our approach to support the discovery of new motifs in gene promoter sequences with promising results.