Fast mining of high dimensional expressive contrast patterns using zero-suppressed binary decision diagrams

Abstract

Patterns of contrast are a very important way of comparing multi-dimensional datasets. Such patterns are able to capture regions of high difference between two classes of data, and are useful for human experts and the construction of classifiers. However, mining such patterns is particularly challenging when the number of dimensions is large. This paper describes a new technique for mining several varieties of contrast pattern, based on the use of Zero-Suppressed Binary Decision Diagrams (ZBDDs), a powerful data structure for manipulating sparse data. We study the mining of both simple contrast patterns, such as emerging patterns, and more novel and complex contrasts, which we call disjuncti..