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Abstract. In this paper we introduce graph-evolution rules, a novel type of frequency-based pattern that describe the evolution of large networks over time, at a local level. Given a sequence of snapshots of an evolving graph, we aim at discovering rules describing the local changes occurring in it. Adopting a definition of support based on minimum image we study the problem of extracting patterns whose frequency is larger than a minimum support threshold. Then, similar to the classical association rules framework, we derive graph-evolution rules from frequent patterns that satisfy a given minimum confidence constraint. We discuss merits and limits of alternative definitions of support and confidence, justifying the chosen framework. To evaluate our approach we devise GERM (Graph Evolution Rule Miner), an algorithm to mine all graph-evolution rules whose support and confidence are greater than given thresholds.The algorithm is applied to analyze four large real-world networks (i.e., two social networks, and two co-authorship networks from bibliographic data), using different time granularities. Our extensive experimentation confirms the feasibility and utility of the presented approach. It further shows that different kinds of networks exhibit different evolution rules, suggesting the usage of these local patterns to globally discriminate different kind of networks.

Abstract. This paper investigates the trade-off between the expressiveness of the pattern language and the performance of the pattern miner in structured data mining. This trade-off is investigated in the context of correlated pattern mining, which is concerned with finding the k-best patterns according to a convex criterion, for the pattern languages of itemsets, multi-itemsets, sequences, trees and graphs. The criteria used in our investigation are the typical ones in data mining: computational cost and predictive accuracy and the domain is that of mining molecular graph databases. More specifically, we provide empirical answers to the following questions: how does the expressive power of the language affect the computational cost? and what is the trade-off between expressiveness of the pattern language and the predictive accuracy of the learned model? While answering the first question, we also introduce a novel stepwise approach to correlated pattern mining in which the results of mining a simpler pattern language are employed as a starting point for mining in a more complex one. This stepwise approach typically leads to significant speed-ups (up to a factor 1000) for mining graphs.

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Abstract

Constrained pattern mining extracts patterns based on their individual merit. Usually this results in far more patterns than a human expert or a machine leaning technique could make use of. Often different patterns or combinations of patterns cover a similar subset of the examples, thus being redundant and not carrying any new information. To remove the redundant information contained in such pattern sets, we propose two general heuristic algorithms-Bouncer and Picker-for selecting a small subset of patterns. We identify several selection techniques for use in this general algorithm and evaluate those on several data sets. The results show that both techniques succeed in severely reducing the number of patterns, while at the same time apparently retaining much of the original information. Additionally, the experiments show that reducing the pattern set indeed improves the quality of classification results. Both results show that the developed solutions are very well suited for the goals we aim at.

Abstract. We present Tree 2 , a new approach to structural classification. This integrated approach induces decision trees that test for pattern occurrence in the inner nodes. It combines state-of-the-art tree mining with sophisticated pruning techniques to find the most discriminative pattern in each node. In contrast to existing methods, Tree 2 uses no heuristics and only a single, statistically well founded parameter has to be chosen by the user. The experiments show that Tree 2 classifiers achieve good accuracies while the induced models are smaller than those of existing approaches, facilitating better comprehensibility.

The class of frequent hypergraph mining problems is introduced which includes the frequent graph mining problem class and contains also the frequent itemset mining problem. We study the computational properties of different problems belonging to this class. In particular, besides negative results, we present practically relevant problems that can be solved in incremental-polynomial time. Some of our practical algorithms are obtained by reductions to frequent graph mining and itemset mining problems. Our experimental results in the domain of citation analysis show the potential of the framework on problems that have no natural representation as an ordinary graph.