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The main purpose of data mining and analytics is to find novel, potentially useful patterns that can be utilized in real-world applications to derive beneficial knowledge. For identifying and evaluating the usefulness of different kinds of patterns, many techniques and constraints have been proposed, such as support, confidence, sequence order, and utility parameters (e.g., weight, price, profit, quantity, satisfaction, etc.). In recent years, there has been an increasing demand for utility-oriented pattern mining (UPM, or called utility mining). UPM is a vital task, with numerous high-impact applications, including cross-marketing, e-commerce, finance, medical, and biomedical applications. This survey aims to provide a general, comprehensive, and structured overview of the state-of-the-art methods of UPM. First, we introduce an in-depth understanding of UPM, including concepts, examples, and comparisons with related concepts. A taxonomy of the most common and state-of-the-art approaches for mining different kinds of high-utility patterns is presented in detail, including Apriori-based, tree-based, projection-based, vertical-/horizontal-data-format-based, and other hybrid approaches. A comprehensive review of advanced topics of existing high-utility pattern mining techniques is offered, with a discussion of their pros and cons. Finally, we present several well-known open-source software packages for UPM. We conclude our survey with a discussion on open and practical challenges in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High-utility sequential pattern (HUSP) mining is an emerging topic in the field of knowledge discovery in databases. It consists of discovering subsequences that have a high utility (importance) in sequences, which can be referred to as HUSPs. HUSPs can be applied to many real-life applications, such as market basket analysis, e-commerce recommendations, click-stream analysis, and route planning. Several algorithms have been proposed to efficiently mine utility-based useful sequential patterns. However, due to the combinatorial explosion of the search space for low utility threshold and large-scale data, the performances of these algorithms are unsatisfactory in terms of runtime and memory usage. Hence, this article proposes an efficient algorithm for the task of HUSP mining, called HUSP mining with UL-list (HUSP-ULL). It utilizes a lexicographic $q$ -sequence (LQS)-tree and a utility-linked (UL)-list structure to quickly discover HUSPs. Furthermore, two pruning strategies are introduced in HUSP-ULL to obtain tight upper bounds on the utility of the candidate sequences and reduce the search space by pruning unpromising candidates early. Substantial experiments on both real-life and synthetic datasets showed that HUSP-ULL can effectively and efficiently discover the complete set of HUSPs and that it outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mining useful patterns from varied types of databases is an important research topic, which has many real-life applications. Most studies have considered the frequency as sole interestingness measure to identify high-quality patterns. However, each object is different in nature. The relative importance of objects is not equal, in terms of criteria, such as the utility, risk, or interest. Besides, another limitation of frequent patterns is that they generally have a low occupancy, that is, they often represent small sets of items in transactions containing many items and, thus, may not be truly representative of these transactions. To extract high-quality patterns in real-life applications, this paper extends the occupancy measure to also assess the utility of patterns in transaction databases. We propose an efficient algorithm named high-utility occupancy pattern mining (HUOPM). It considers user preferences in terms of frequency, utility, and occupancy. A novel frequency-utility tree and two compact data structures, called the utility-occupancy list and frequency-utility table, are designed to provide global and partial downward closure properties for pruning the search space. The proposed method can efficiently discover the complete set of high-quality patterns without candidate generation. Extensive experiments have been conducted on several datasets to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm. Results show that the derived patterns are intelligible, reasonable, and acceptable, and that HUOPM with its pruning strategies outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithm, in terms of runtime and search space, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]