Mining event histories: a social science perspective

We explore how recent data mining-based tools developed in domains such as biomedicine or text mining for extracting interesting knowledge from sequence data could be applied to personal life course data. We focus on two types of approaches: ‘survival’ trees that attempt to partition the data into homogeneous groups regarding their survival characteristics, i.e., the duration until a given event occurs and the mining of typical discriminating episodes. We show how these approaches may fruitfully complement the outcome of more classical event history analyses and single out some specific issues raised by their application to socio-demographic data.