View top-k high utility episodes with the Visual Pattern Viewer (SPMF documentation)

Top-k high utility episodes are a type of patterns that can be produced by different algorithms offered in SPMF.

This page explains how to visualize the top-k high utility episodes found by an algorithm using the Visual Pattern Viewer.

How to run this example?

If you want to run this example using the graphical user interface of SPMF, follow these steps.

1) First, select an top-k high utility episode mining algorithm offered in SPMF. Several algorithms are offered and are described in the documentation of SPMF.

2) Then, in the user interface of SPMF, after selecting an algorithm and setting its input file path, output file path, and parameters, click on the combo-box besides "Open output file using:", and select "Visualize_top-k_high_utility_episodes" so that the discovered patterns will be opened with the visual pattern viewer.

3) Then click on "Run algorithm" to run the algorithm.

After the algorithm terminates, the discovered patterns will be displayed using the Visual Pattern Viewer:

The Visual Pattern Viewer interface is quite intuitive. It displays each pattern with its value for each evaluation measure using a colored bar.

The Visual Pattern Viewer offers several features such as:

• Viewing patterns using different layouts (grid, horizontal and vertical layout).
• Sorting patterns by size and measure values.
• Searching and filtering using measure values
• Displaying statistics about the number of patterns found.

Other ways of running the Visual Pattern Viewer

It is also possible to run the Visual Pattern Viewer as an algorithm from the GUI of SPMF..

In this case, in the user interface of SPMF, select "Visualize_top-k_high_utility_episodes" as algorithm. Then, select a file containing top-k high utility episodes as input file. Then, click "run algorithm".

This will display the patterns from the file using the Visual Pattern Viewer.

Besides, it is also possible to call the Visual Pattern Viewer from the command line interface of SPMF using this syntax:

java -jar spmf.jar run ALGORITHM_NAME PATTERN_FILE.TXT in a folder containing spmf.jar and an input file containing a pattern file, here called: PATTERN_FILE.txt.

What is the input file format?

The algorithm takes as input a file containing top-k high utility episodes.

The file format is defined as follows. It is a text file, where each line represents an top-k high utility episode.

Each line is a high utility episode. Each event in a high utility episode is a positive integer and items from the same event set within an episode are separated by single spaces. The value "-1" indicates the end of an event set. On each line, the episode is first indicated. Then, the keyword "#UTIL:" appears followed by a double value indicating the utility of the pattern (a positive number). For example, here is a pattern file:

The last line indicates that the high utility episode consisting of the event set (3, 5), followed by the itemset (3), followed by (4, 5) has a utility of 37. Other lines follow the same format.