Influencer Events in Episode Rules: A Way to Impact the Occurrence of Events

International audienceEpisode rules are event patterns mined from a single event sequence. They are mainly used to predict the occurrence of events (the consequent of the rule), once the antecedent has occurred. The occurrence of the consequent of a rule may however be disturbed by the occurrence of another event in the sequence (that does not belong to the antecedent). We refer such an event to as an influencer event. To the best of our knowledge, the identification of such events in the context of episode rules has never been studied. However, identifying influencer events is of the highest importance as these events can be viewed as a way to act to impact the occurrence of events, here the consequent of rules. We propose to identify three types of influencer events: distance influencer events, confidence influencer events and disappearance events. To identify these influencer events, we propose to rely on the set of episode rules discovered by mining algorithms. The proposed approach for discovering influencer events is evaluated on an event sequence of social networks messages. Experiments measure the execution time efficiency according to the adopted episode rules mining algorithm. In addition, they show that some events do actually highly influence the consequent of some rules, that influencer events may not only influence several consequents, but also influence several characteristics of rules