MINING FUZZY TEMPORAL ITEMSETS WITHIN VARIOUS TIME INTERVALS IN QUANTITATIVE DATASETS

This research aims at proposing a new method for discovering frequent temporal itemsets in continuous subsets of a dataset with quantitative transactions. It is important to note that although these temporal itemsets may have relatively high textit{support} or occurrence within particular time intervals, they do not necessarily get similar textit{support} across the whole dataset, which makes it almost impossible to extract them using the existing traditional algorithms. This paper directly addresses this problem and introduces a new algorithm called Fuzzy Solid Linguistic Itemset Mining (FSLIM) to discover Solid Linguistic Itemsets (SLIs) within a quantitative dataset. SLI is a new concept introduced here as an essential part of the solution presented in this paper. The proposed method consists of two phases. In the first phase, fuzzy set theory is used to transform each quantitative value to a linguistic item; and in the second phase, all SLIs are extracted. Finally, the efficiency of FSLIM is compared in terms of execution time, scalability and the number of frequent patterns with those of two classic approaches on synthetic datasets. The proposed approach is also applied to an actual Mashhad Urban Traffic dataset in order to illustrate FSLIM's ability in discovering the hidden knowledge that could not be extracted by traditional methods.