Attribute, Event Sequence, and Event Type Similarity Notions for Data Mining
Pirjo Moen · Työväentutkimus Vuosikirja · 2000
In data mining and knowledge discovery, similarity between objects is one of the central concepts. A measure of similarity can be user-defined, but an important problem is defining similarity on the basis of data. In this thesis we consider three kinds of similarity notions: similarity between binary attributes, similarity between event sequences, and similarity between event types occurring in sequences. Traditional approaches for defining similarity between two attributes typically consider only the values of those two attributes, not the values of any other attributes in the relation. Such similarity measures are often useful, but unfortunately they cannot describe all important types of similarity. Therefore, we introduce a new attribute similarity measure that takes into account the values of other attributes in the relation. The behavior of the different measures of attribute similarity is demonstrated by giving empirical results on two real-life data sets. We also present a si...