Discovering Periodic Patterns in Non-uniform Temporal Databases

A temporal database is a collection of transactions, ordered by their timestamps. Discovering periodic patterns in temporal databases has numerous applications. However, to the best of our knowledge, no work has considered mining periodic patterns in temporal databases where items have dissimilar support and periodicity, despite that this type of data is very common in real-life. Discovering periodic patterns in such non-uniform temporal databases is challenging. It requires defining (i) an appropriate measure to assess the periodic interestingness of patterns, and (ii) a method to efficiently find all periodic patterns. While a pattern-growth approach can be employed for the second sub-task, the first subtask has to the best of our knowledge not been addressed. Moreover, how these two tasks are combined has significant implications. In this paper, we address this challenge. We introduce a model to assess the periodic interestingness of patterns in databases having a non-uniform item distribution, which considers that periodic patterns may have different period and minimum number of cyclic repetitions. Moreover, the paper introduces a pattern-growth algorithm to efficiently discover all periodic patterns. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is efficient and the proposed model may be utilized to find prior knowledge about event keywords and their associations in Twitter data.