Mining Top-K Patterns from Binary Datasets in presence of Noise

The discovery of patterns in binary dataset has many applications, e.g. in electronic commerce, TCP/IP networking, Web usage logging, etc. Still, this is a very challenging task in many respects: overlapping vs. non overlapping patterns, presence of noise, extraction of the most important patterns only. In this paper we formalize the problem of discovering the Top-K patterns from binary datasets in presence of noise, as the minimization of a novel cost function. According to the Minimum Description Length principle, the proposed cost function favors succinct pattern sets that may approximately describe the input data. We propose a greedy algorithm for the discovery of Patterns in Noisy Datasets, named PaNDa, and show that it outperforms related techniques on both synthetic and real-world data. Copyright © by SIAM.