Questions about Periodic Pattern Mining
(from the Pattern Mining Course)

Click on a question to see the answer.

Question 1: What is a simple event sequence? What is a complex event sequence?

A simple event sequence is a sequence that does not contain simultaneous events (events that have the same timestamp). A complex event sequence is a sequence that contains at least two events with the same timestamp. For instance <({a},1),({b},3),({c},5)> is a simple event sequence, while <({a,b,c},1),({b},3),({c},5)> is a complex event sequence.

Question 2: What is a parallel episode?

A parallel episode is an episode that contains a single event set. For example {a,b} is a parallel episode.

Question 3: What is a serial episode?

A serial episode is a list of event sets where each event set contains a single event. For example <{a}{b},{d}> is a serial episode but <{a}{b},{c,d}> is not a serial episode.

Question 4: Consider the event sequence <({a},1),({a,b,c},3),({c},5), ({a},6),({b,c},7),({a},8)> and the head support. What is the set of occurrences of episode <{a}>? What is the head support of <{a}>?

The set of occurrences of <{a}> is occSet(<{a}>)={[1,1],[3,3],[6,6],[8,8]}. Thus, the head support of that episode is 4.

Question 5: Consider the event sequence <({a},1),({a,b,c},3),({c},5), ({a},6),({b,c},7),({a},8)> and the head support. What is the set of occurrences of episode <{b,c}>? What is the head support of <{b,c}>?

The set of occurrences of <{b,c}> is occSet(<{b,c}>)={[3,3],[7,7]}. Thus, the head support of that episode is sup(<{b,c}>) = |{3,7} | = 2.

Question 6: Consider the event sequence <({a},1),({a,b,c},3),({c},5), ({a},6),({b,c},7),({a},8)> and the head support. What is the set of occurrences of episode <{a},{c}>? What is the head support of <{a},{c}>?

The set of occurrences of <{a},{c}> is occSet(<{a},{c}>)={[1,3],[1,5],[1,7],[3,5],[3,7],[6,7]}. Thus, the head support of that episode is sup(<{a},{c}>) = |{1,3,6} | = 3.

Question 7: What is a frequent maximal episode? Why is it interesting to discover maximal episodes?

A frequent maximal episode is a frequent episode that is not a subsequence of another larger frequent episode. It is interesting to discover frequent maximal episodes for some applications to reduce the number of frequent episodes that is presented to the user. Generally, the number of frequent maximal episodes will be much smaller than the whole set of frequent episodes.

Question 8: What is an episode rule?

An episode rule is a pattern that has the form X --> Y indicating that if some episode X appears, it is likely to be followed by another episode Y. Episode rule mining is interesting for applications that require to perform predictions. There are various definitions of episode rules and also several algorithms to find episode rules.

Question 9: What are the main differences between episode mining and sequential pattern mining?

In episode mining, the goal is to find subsequence of events that appear frequently in a single long sequence of events with timestamps. In sequential pattern mining, the goal is to find subsequences of events that appear in many sequences, and sequences generally have no timestamps.