PBFMCSP: Prefix Based Fast Mining of Closed Sequential Patterns

In recent years, mining of sequential patterns has been studied extensively in various domains. Most of the existing algorithms find patterns in transactional databases by scanning the records whether they contain patterns or not. This paper proposes a novel algorithm to mine closed sequential patterns using an inverted matrix and prefix based sequence element matrix. Inverted matrix minimizes the search space for discovering various sequential patterns of different items. We use a prefix based sequence element matrix to minimize the scans required at levels k and k+1 in the mining process. Our experimental results show the performance improvement of the new algorithm over the previous work.