A Metaheuristic Approach for Mining Gradual Patterns

Swarm intelligence is a discipline that studies the collective behavior that is produced by local interactions of a group of individuals with each other and with their environment. In Computer Science domain, numerous swarm intelligence techniques are applied to optimization problems that seek to efficiently find best solutions within a search space. Gradual pattern mining is another Computer Science field that could benefit from the efficiency of swarm based optimization techniques in the task of finding gradual patterns from a huge search space. A gradual pattern is a rule-based correlation that describes the gradual relationship among the attributes of a data set. For example, given attributes {G,H} of a data set a gradual pattern may take the form: "the less G, the more H". In this paper, we propose a numeric encoding for gradual pattern candidates that we use to define an effective search space. In addition, we present a systematic study of several meta-heuristic optimization techniques as efficient solutions to the problem of finding gradual patterns using our search space.

Ant Colony Optimization for Mining Gradual Patterns

Gradual pattern extraction is a field in (KDD) Knowledge Discovery in Databases that maps correlations between attributes of a data set as gradual dependencies. A gradual dependency may take a form of "the more Attribute K , the less Attribute L". In this paper, we propose an ant colony optimization technique that uses a probabilistic approach to learn and extract frequent gradual patterns. Through computational experiments on real-world data sets, we compared the performance of our ant-based algorithm to an existing gradual item set extraction algorithm and we found out that our algorithm outperforms the later especially when dealing with large data sets.