Sparesort is a Java library for performing sequential pattern mining, which is a data mining problem for analyzing sequencing or time related processes, e.g. customer purchase or web access patterns. This library implements BIDE, an efficient algorithm for mining frequent closed sequences.

• Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 1.5 or higher

The distribution contains an executable JAR (sparesort-X.Y.Z.jar). You can simply try the argorithm by running java -jar command in your console.

java -classpath commons-lang3-3.1.jar:slf4j-api-1.6.4.jar \
     -jar sparesort-X.Y.Z.jar \
     min_sup sequence1 sequence2 sequence3 ...

Note that dependent libraries (Commons Lang and SLF4J) are provided by the classpath argument. This console application takes the following two kinds of arguments:

• The first argument min_sup is an absolute minimium support, an integer larger than 1.
• The other argumets sequence1 sequence2 sequence3 ... are paths to sequence files. Each file contains one sequence of string items separated by new lines.

After mining is finished, all frequent closed sequences qualified by the threshold and their frequency are printed to the standard output.

1. Create an instance of jp.ac.titech.cs.se.sparesort.SequenceDatabase<T> which supports addSequence(List<T>) and addSequence(T...) methods to load item sequences.

    // Create and load seqauence database
    SequenceDatabase<String> sdb = new SequenceDatabase<String>()
    	.addSequence("C", "A", "A", "B", "C")
    	.addSequence("A", "B", "C", "B")
    	.addSequence("C", "A", "B", "C")
    	.addSequence("A", "B", "B", "C", "A");
   

2. (Optional) Set an alternative mining strategy. When no strategy is given, jp.ac.titech.cs.se.sparesort.bide.RecursiveBIDE<T> is used as a default strategy to perform depth-first mining based on recursive calls.

    sdb.setMiningStrategy(new RecursiveBIDE<String>());
   

3. Execute mineFrequentClosedSequences(int) method giving an absolute minimum support threshold as its argument. The return value is a mapping from frequent sequences found in the sequence database and their frequency.

    Map<List<String>, Integer> result = sdb.mineFrequentClosedSequences(2);
   

Sparesort is built by using Apache Maven. Before you proceed, download Maven and configure the environment variable M2_HOME properly.

1. Fork (or download) the source code.
2. Open your terminal or command prompt, move to the directory containing pom.xml and hit mvn package there.
3. After maven build succeeds, you will find sparesort-X.Y.Z.jar in target/ subdirectory.

BIDE algorithm was presented by Wang and Han in the follwoing paper:

• Jianyong Wang, Jiawei Han: “BIDE: Efficient mining of frequent closed sequences”. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2004), 30 March - 2 April 2004, Boston, USA, pp. 79–90. doi:10.1109/ICDE.2004.1319986

Sparesort is designed for stimulating researchers in software and data engineering. If you use this library in your research and publications, please cite the following article as its source:

• Hiroshi Kazato, Shinpei Hayashi, Tsuyoshi Oshima, Shunsuke Miyata, Takashi Hoshino, Motoshi Saeki: "Extracting and Visualizing Implementation Structure of Features". In Proceedings of the 20th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC 2013). Bangkok, Thailand, dec, 2013.

Copyright (c) 2010-2012 Saeki Lab. at Tokyo Institute of Technology.
Sparesort is an open source software, licensed under the Apache Licese, Version 2.0.