Mining first-order temporal interval patterns with regular expression constraints

Abstract

Most methods for temporal pattern mining assume that time is represented by points in a straight line starting at some initial instant. In this paper, we consider a new kind of first order temporal pattern, specified in Allen's Temporal Interval Logic, where time is explicitly represented by intervals. We present the algorithm MILPRIT for mining temporal interval patterns, which uses variants of the classical level-wise search algorithms. MILPRIT allows a broad spectrum of constraints over temporal patterns to be incorporated in the mining process. Some experimental results over synthetic and real data are presented. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.