An Approach for Incremental Mining of Clickstream Patterns as a Service Application

Sequential pattern mining in general and one particular form, clickstream pattern mining, are data mining topics that have recently attracted attention due to their potential applications of discovering useful patterns. However, in order to provide them as real-world service applications, one issue that needs to be addressed is that traditional algorithms often view databases as static. In reality, databases often grow over time and invalidate parts of the previous results after updates, forcing the algorithms to rerun from scratch on the updated databases to obtain updated frequent patterns. This can be inefficient as a service application due to the cost in terms of resources, and the returning of results to users can take longer when the databases get bigger. The response time can be shortened if the algorithms update the results based on incremental changes in databases. Thus, we propose PF-CUP (pre-frequent clickstream mining using pseudo-IDList), an approach towards incremental clickstream pattern mining as a service. The algorithm is based on the pre-large concept to maintain and update results and a data structure called a pre-frequent hash table to maintain the information about patterns. The experiments completed on different databases show that the proposed algorithm is efficient in incremental clickstream pattern mining.