A new modeling technique based on Markov chains to mine behavioral patterns in event based time series

Abstract

A new modeling technique to mine information from data that are expressed in the form of events associated to entities is presented. In particular such a technique aims at extracting non-evident behavioral patterns from data in order to identify different classes of entities in the considered population. To represent the behavior of the entities a Markov chain model is adopted and the transition probabilities for such a model are computed. The information extracted by means of the proposed technique can be used as decisional support in a large range of problems, such as marketing or social behavioral questions. A case study concerning the university dropout problem is presented together with further development of Markov chain modeling technique in order to improve the prediction and/or interpretation power.