Mining time-gap sequential patterns

Abstract

Mining sequential patterns is to discover sequential purchasing behaviors for most of the customers from a large amount of customer transactions. An example of such a pattern is that most of the customers purchased item B after purchasing item A, and then they purchased item C after using item B. The manager can use this information to promote item B and item C when a customer purchased item A and item B, respectively. However, the manager cannot know what time the customers will need these products if we only discover the sequential patterns without any extra information. In this paper, we develop a new algorithm to discover not only the sequential patterns but also the time interval between any two items in the pattern. We call this information the time-gap sequential patterns. An example of time-gap sequential pattern is that most customers purchased item A, and then they bought item B after m to n days, and then after p to q days, they bought item C. When a customer bought item A, the information about item B can be sent to this customer after m to n days, that is, we can provide the product information in which the customer is interested on the appropriate date. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.