Abstract
Pattern mining is an important task of data mining and involves the extraction of interesting associations from large transactional databases. Typically, a given transactional database D gets updated due to the addition and deletion of transactions. Consequently, some of the previously discovered patterns may become invalid, while some new patterns may emerge. This has motivated significant research efforts in the area of incremental mining. The goal of incremental mining is to efficiently mine patterns when D gets updated with additions and/or deletions of transactions as opposed to mining all of the patterns from scratch. Incidentally, active research efforts are being made to develop incremental pattern mining algorithms for extracting frequent patterns, sequential patterns and utility patterns. Another important type of pattern is the coverage pattern (CP), which has significant applications in areas such as banner advertising, search engine advertising and visibility mining. However, none of the existing works address the issue of incremental mining for extracting CPs. In this regard, the main contributions of this work are twofold. First, we introduce the problem of incremental mining of CPs. Second, we propose an approach, designated as Comprehensive Coverage Pattern Mining, for efficiently extracting CPs under the incremental paradigm. We have also performed extensive experiments using two real click-stream datasets and one synthetic dataset to demonstrate the overall effectiveness of our proposed approach.