Pattern Mining and Sense-Making Support for Enhancing the User Experience

While data mining techniques such as frequent itemset and sequence mining are well established as powerful pattern discovery tools in domains from science, medicine to business, a detriment is the lack of support for interactive exploration of high numbers of patterns generated with diverse parameter settings and the relationships among the mined patterns. To enhance the user experience, real-time query turnaround times and improved support for interactive mining are desired. There is also an increasing interest in applying data mining solutions for mobile data. Patterns mined over mobile data may enable context-aware applications ranging from automating frequently repeated tasks to providing personalized recommendations. Overall, this dissertation addresses three problems that limit the utility of data mining, namely, (a.) lack of interactive exploration tools for mined patterns, (b.) insufficient support for mining localized patterns, and (c.) high computational mining requirements prohibiting mining of patterns on smaller compute units such as a smartphone. This dissertation develops interactive frameworks for the guided exploration of mined patterns and their relationships. Contributions include the PARAS pre- processing and indexing framework; enabling analysts to gain key insights into rule relationships in a parameter space view due to the compact storage of rules that enables query-time reconstruction of complete rulesets. Contributions also include the visual rule exploration framework FIRE that presents an interactive dual view of the parameter space and the rule space, that together enable enhanced sense-making of rule relationships. This dissertation also supports the online mining of localized association rules computed on data subsets by selectively deploying alternative execution strategies that leverage multidimensional itemset-based data partitioning index. Finally, we designed OLAPH, an on-device context-aware service that learns phone usage patterns over mobile context data such as app usage, location, call and SMS logs to provide device intelligence. Concepts introduced for modeling mobile data as sequences include compressing context logs to intervaled context events, adding generalized time features, and identifying meaningful sequences via filter expressions