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Efficient mining of the most significant patterns with permutation testing

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Abstract

The extraction of patterns displaying significant association with a class label is a key data mining task with wide application in many domains. We introduce and study a variant of the problem that requires to mine the top-k statistically significant patterns, thus providing tight control on the number of patterns reported in output. We develop TopKWY, the first algorithm to mine the top-k significant patterns while rigorously controlling the family-wise error rate of the output, and provide theoretical evidence of its effectiveness. TopKWY crucially relies on a novel strategy to explore statistically significant patterns and on several key implementation choices, which may be of independent interest. Our extensive experimental evaluation shows that TopKWY enables the extraction of the most significant patterns from large datasets which could not be analyzed by the state-of-the-art. In addition, TopKWY improves over the state-of-the-art even for the extraction of all significant patterns.

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Notes

  1. This assumes that the search tree for patterns has the property that the children of a node have support not greater than the node itself, which is a usual property of pattern mining algorithms (Han et al. 2007; Uno et al. 2005; Nijssen and Kok 2004) and is required by WYlight as well.

  2. http://fimi.ua.ac.be.

  3. https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/index.php.

  4. https://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/libsvmtools/datasets/.

  5. http://www.philippe-fournier-viger.com/spmf.

  6. https://ls11-www.cs.tu-dortmund.de/staff/morris/graphkerneldatasets.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported, in part by the National Science Foundation grant IIS-1247581 (https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1247581), by the University of Padova grants SID2017 and STARS: Algorithms for Inferential Data Mining, and by MIUR, the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research, under PRIN Project n. 20174LF3T8 AHeAD (Efficient Algorithms for HArnessing Networked Data).

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  1. Department of Information Engineering, Università di Padova, Via G. Gradenigo 6/B, 35131, Padua, IT, Italy

    Leonardo Pellegrina & Fabio Vandin

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  1. Leonardo Pellegrina
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  2. Fabio Vandin
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Correspondence to Fabio Vandin.

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Responsible editor: M. J. Zaki.

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A preliminary version of this work appeared in the proceedings of ACM KDD’18 as (Pellegrina and Vandin 2018).

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Pellegrina, L., Vandin, F. Efficient mining of the most significant patterns with permutation testing. Data Min Knowl Disc 34, 1201–1234 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10618-020-00687-8

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