Contextual Sequential Pattern Mining

Traditional sequential patterns do not take into account additional contextual information since patterns extracted from data are usually general. By considering the fact that a pattern is associated with one specific context the decision expert can then adapt his strategy considering the type of customers. In this paper we propose to mine more precise patterns of the form "young users buy products A and B then product C, while old users do not follow this same behavior". By highlighting relevant properties of such contexts, we show how contextual sequential patterns can be extracted by mining the database in a concise manner. We conduct our experimental evaluation on real-world data and demonstrate performance issues.