Efficient incremental mining of contrast patterns in changing data

Abstract

A contrast pattern is a set of items (itemset) whose frequency differs significantly between two classes of data. Such patterns describe distinguishing characteristics between datasets, are meaningful to human experts, have strong discriminating ability and can be used for powerful classifiers. Incrementally mining such patterns is very important for evolving datasets, where transactions can be either inserted or deleted and mining needs to be repeated after changes occur. When the change is small, it is undesirable to carry out mining from scratch. Rather, the set of previously mined contrast patterns should be reused where possible to compute the new patterns. A primary example of evolving..