WIS: Weighted Interesting Sequential Pattern Mining with a Similar Level of Support and/or Weight

Sequential pattern mining has become an essential task with broad applications. Most sequential pattern mining algorithms use a minimum support threshold to prune the combinatorial search space. This strategy provides basic pruning; however, it cannot mine correlated sequential patterns with similar support and/or weight levels. If the minimum support is low, many spurious patterns having items with different support levels are found; if the minimum support is high, meaningful sequential patterns with low support levels may be missed. We present a new algorithm, weighted interesting sequential (WIS) pattern mining based on a pattern growth method in which new measures, sequential s‐confidence and w‐confidence, are suggested. Using these measures, weighted interesting sequential patterns with similar levels of support and/or weight are mined. The WIS algorithm gives a balance between the measures of support and weight, and considers correlation between items within sequential patterns. A performance analysis shows that WIS is efficient and scalable in weighted sequential pattern mining.