System and method for sequence-based subspace pattern clustering

摘要

Unlike traditional clustering methods that focus on grouping objects with similar values on a set of dimensions, clustering by pattern similarity finds objects that exhibit a coherent pattern of rise and fall in subspaces. Pattern-based clustering extends the concept of traditional clustering and benefits a wide range of applications, including e-Commerce target marketing, bioinformatics (large scale scientific data analysis), and automatic computing (web usage analysis), etc. However, state-of-the-art pattern-based clustering methods (e.g., the pCluster algorithm) can only handle datasets of thousands of records, which makes them inappropriate for many real-life applications. Furthermore, besides the huge data volume, many data sets are also characterized by their sequentiality, for instance, customer purchase records and network event logs are usually modeled as data sequences. Hence, it becomes important to enable pattern-based clustering methods i) to handle large datasets, and ii) to discover pattern similarity embedded in data sequences. There is presented herein a novel method that offers this capability.