■ Basic patterns: As discussed in Chapter 6, a frequent pattern may have several alternative forms, including a simple frequent pattern, a closed pattern, or a max-pattern. To review, a frequent pattern is a pattern (or itemset) that satisfies a minimum support threshold. A pattern p is a closed pattern if there is no superpattern p′ with the same support as p. Pattern p is a max-pattern if there exists no frequent superpattern of p. Frequent patterns can also be mapped into association rules, or other kinds of rules based on interestingness measures. Sometimes we may also be interested in infrequent or rare patterns (i.e., patterns that occur rarely but are of critical importance, or negative patterns (i.e., patterns that reveal a negative correlation between items).

■ Based on the abstraction levels involved in a pattern: Patterns or association rules may have items or concepts residing at high, low, or multiple abstraction levels. For example, suppose that a set of association rules mined includes the following rules where X is a variable representing a customer:

(7.1)

(7.2)

In Rules (7.1) and (7.2), the items bought are referenced at different abstraction levels (e.g., “computer” is a higher-level abstraction of “laptop computer,” and “color laser printer” is a lower-level abstraction of “printer”). We refer to the rule set mined as consisting of multilevel association rules. If, instead, the rules within a given set do not reference items or attributes at different abstraction levels, then the set contains single-level association rules.

■ Based on the number of dimensions involved in the rule or pattern: If the items or attributes in an association rule or pattern reference only one dimension, it is a single-dimensional association rule/pattern. For example, Rules (7.1) and (7.2) are single-dimensional association rules because they each refer to only one dimension, buys.¹
If a rule/pattern references two or more dimensions, such as age, income, and buys, then it is a multidimensional association rule/pattern. The following is an example of a multidimensional rule:

(7.3)

■ Based on the types of values handled in the rule or pattern: If a rule involves associations between the presence or absence of items, it is a Boolean association rule. For example, Rules (7.1) and (7.2) are Boolean association rules obtained from market basket analysis.
If a rule describes associations between quantitative items or attributes, then it is a quantitative association rule. In these rules, quantitative values for items or attributes are partitioned into intervals. Rule (7.3) can also be considered a quantitative association rule where the quantitative attributes age and income have been discretized.

■ Based on the constraints or criteria used to mine selective patterns: The patterns or rules to be discovered can be constraint-based (i.e., satisfying a set of user-defined constraints), approximate, compressed, near-match (i.e., those that tally the support count of the near or almost matching itemsets), top-k (i.e., the k most frequent itemsets for a user-specified value, k), redundancy-aware top-k (i.e., the top-k patterns with similar or redundant patterns excluded), and so on.

■ Based on kinds of data and features to be mined: Given relational and data warehouse data, most people are interested in itemsets. Thus, frequent pattern mining in this context is essentially frequent itemset mining, that is, to mine frequent sets of items. However, in many other applications, patterns may involve sequences and structures. For example, by studying the order in which items are frequently purchased, we may find that customers tend to first buy a PC, followed by a digital camera, and then a memory card. This leads to sequential patterns, that is, frequent subsequences (which are often separated by some other events) in a sequence of ordered events.
We may also mine structural patterns, that is, frequent substructures, in a structured data set. Note that structure is a general concept that covers many different kinds of structural forms such as directed graphs, undirected graphs, lattices, trees, sequences, sets, single items, or combinations of such structures. Single items are the simplest form of structure. Each element of a general pattern may contain a subsequence, a subtree, a subgraph, and so on, and such containment relationships can be defined recursively. Therefore, structural pattern mining can be considered as the most general form of frequent pattern mining.

■ Based on application domain-specific semantics: Both data and applications can be very diverse, and therefore the patterns to be mined can differ largely based on their domain-specific semantics. Various kinds of application data include spatial data, temporal data, spatiotemporal data, multimedia data (e.g., image, audio, and video data), text data, time-series data, DNA and biological sequences, software programs, chemical compound structures, web structures, sensor networks, social and information networks, biological networks, data streams, and so on. This diversity can lead to dramatically different pattern mining methodologies.

■ Based on data analysis usages: Frequent pattern mining often serves as an intermediate step for improved data understanding and more powerful data analysis. For example, it can be used as a feature extraction step for classification, which is often referred to as pattern-based classification. Similarly, pattern-based clustering has shown its strength at clustering high-dimensional data. For improved data understanding, patterns can be used for semantic annotation or contextual analysis. Pattern analysis can also be used in recommender systems, which recommend information items (e.g., books, movies, web pages) that are likely to be of interest to the user based on similar users' patterns. Different analysis tasks may require mining rather different kinds of patterns as well.