Efficiently Sampling Interval Patterns from Numerical Databases
This work addresses a specific bottleneck in pattern sampling for numerical data analysis, offering incremental improvements over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of sampling interval patterns from numerical databases by introducing Fips and HFips, which sample patterns proportionally to frequency and hyper-volume, respectively, and demonstrate efficiency in handling the long-tail phenomenon in experiments.
Pattern sampling has emerged as a promising approach for information discovery in large databases, allowing analysts to focus on a manageable subset of patterns. In this approach, patterns are randomly drawn based on an interestingness measure, such as frequency or hyper-volume. This paper presents the first sampling approach designed to handle interval patterns in numerical databases. This approach, named Fips, samples interval patterns proportionally to their frequency. It uses a multi-step sampling procedure and addresses a key challenge in numerical data: accurately determining the number of interval patterns that cover each object. We extend this work with HFips, which samples interval patterns proportionally to both their frequency and hyper-volume. These methods efficiently tackle the well-known long-tail phenomenon in pattern sampling. We formally prove that Fips and HFips sample interval patterns in proportion to their frequency and the product of hyper-volume and frequency, respectively. Through experiments on several databases, we demonstrate the quality of the obtained patterns and their robustness against the long-tail phenomenon.