Evaluating Pattern Set Mining Strategies in a Constraint Programming Framework

The pattern mining community has shifted its attention from local pattern mining to pattern set mining. The task of pattern set mining is concerned with finding a set of patterns that satisfies a set of constraints and often also scores best w.r.t. an optimisation criteria. Furthermore, while in local pattern mining the constraints are imposed at the level of individual patterns, in pattern set mining they are also concerned with the overall set of patterns. A wide variety of different pattern set mining techniques is available in literature. The key contribution of this paper is that it studies, compares and evaluates such search strategies for pattern set mining. The investigation employs concept-learning as a benchmark for pattern set mining and employs a constraint programming framework in which key components of pattern set mining are formulated and implemented. The study leads to novel insights into the strong and weak points of different pattern set mining strategies.