SUMMARIZING SETS OF CATEGORICAL SEQUENCES - Selecting and Visualizing Representative Sequences

Alexis Gabadinho, Gilbert Ritschard, Matthias Studer, Nicolas S. Müller

2009

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the summarization of a set of categorical sequence data. More specifically, the problem studied is the determination of the smallest possible number of representative sequences that ensure a given coverage of the whole set, i.e. that have together a given percentage of sequences in their neighborhood. The goal is to yield a representative set that exhibits the key features of the whole sequence data set and permits easy sounded interpretation. We propose an heuristic for determining the representative set that first builds a list of candidates using a representativeness score and then eliminates redundancy. We propose also a visualization tool for rendering the results and quality measures for evaluating them. The proposed tools have been implemented in TraMineR our R package for mining and visualizing sequence data and we demonstrate their efficiency on a real world example from social sciences. The methods are nonetheless by no way limited to social science data and should prove useful in many other domains.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Gabadinho A., Ritschard G., Studer M. and Müller N. (2009). SUMMARIZING SETS OF CATEGORICAL SEQUENCES - Selecting and Visualizing Representative Sequences . In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval - Volume 1: KDIR, (IC3K 2009) ISBN 978-989-674-011-5, pages 62-69. DOI: 10.5220/0002300400620069

in Bibtex Style

@conference{kdir09,
author={Alexis Gabadinho and Gilbert Ritschard and Matthias Studer and Nicolas S. Müller},
title={SUMMARIZING SETS OF CATEGORICAL SEQUENCES - Selecting and Visualizing Representative Sequences},
booktitle={Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval - Volume 1: KDIR, (IC3K 2009)},
year={2009},
pages={62-69},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0002300400620069},
isbn={978-989-674-011-5},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval - Volume 1: KDIR, (IC3K 2009)
TI - SUMMARIZING SETS OF CATEGORICAL SEQUENCES - Selecting and Visualizing Representative Sequences
SN - 978-989-674-011-5
AU - Gabadinho A.
AU - Ritschard G.
AU - Studer M.
AU - Müller N.
PY - 2009
SP - 62
EP - 69
DO - 10.5220/0002300400620069