Extended Time Constraints for Sequence Mining

Many applications require techniques for temporal knowledge discovery. Some of those approaches can handle time constraints between events. In particular some work has been done to mine generalized sequential patterns. However, such constraints are often too crisp or need a very precise assessment to avoid erroneous information. Therefore, in this paper we propose to soften temporal constraints used for generalized sequential pattern mining. To handle these constraints while data mining, we design an algorithm based on sequence graphs. Moreover, as these relaxed constraints may extract more generalized patterns, we propose temporal accuracy measure for helping the analysis of the numerous discovered patterns.