A comparison study on algorithms for incremental update of frequent sequences

The problem of mining frequent sequences is to extract frequently occurring subsequences in a sequence database. Algorithms on this mining problem include GSP, MFS, and SPADE. The problem of incremental update of frequent sequences is to keep track of the set of frequent sequences as the underlying database changes. Previous studies have extended the traditional algorithms to efficiently solve the update problem. These incremental algorithms include ISM, GSP+ and MFS+. Each incremental algorithm has its own characteristics and they have been studied and evaluated separately under different scenarios. This paper presents a comprehensive study on the relative performance of the incremental algorithms as well as their non-incremental counterparts. Our goal is to provide guidelines on the choice of an algorithm for solving the incremental update problem given the various characteristics of a sequence database.