sequential pattern or itemset fp tree

Question

FP-growth algorithms are used for Itemset Mining. Is there a way to use these algorithms for Sequential Pattern Mining instead of Itemset Mining?

Answer 1

The FPGrowth algorithm is defined to be used on transactions to find itemsets. Thus, it does not care about the order of items, and each item can only appear once in a transaction.

If you want to apply it to sequences to find sequential patterns, then this is a more general problem. In other words, itemset mining is a special case of sequential pattern mining. To handle this problem, you would need to generalize FPGrowth. First, you would need to modify the FPTree to store sequences where items can appear more than once. This means to change how the branch of the trees are created. But also you would need to change how links between node representing items are treated since the same item can appear multiple times per sequence.

But is it really a good idea? I am not sure about it. There are many sequential pattern mining algorithms. For example, you can use several imlementation in my SPMF data mining library (http://www.philippe-fournier-viger.com/spmf/ ) impltemented in Java, so you don't need to implement it by yourself.