A New Identification Method for Visualizing Trends
in Transactional Data
Dr.S.Subramanian Mr.B.Gopinathan
Principal Research Scholar
Sri Krishna College of Engg. & Tech. Adhiyamaan College of Engg
Coimbatore – India Hosur – India
gopinathanme@gmail.com
Abstract - Nowadays many Organizations are capturing more
data about their customers, suppliers, competitors, and
business environment. Most of this data is multi-attribute and
temporal in nature. Many Data mining and business
intelligence techniques are used to discover patterns in such
data; however, Visualizing and analyzing this type of data can
be extremely difficult because it can have numerous attributes.
Hence a new technique is needed to mine the data according to
specific time periods and then compare the data mining results
across time periods to discover similarities. A new data
analysis and visualization technique that presents complex
multiattribute temporal data in a cohesive graphical manner
by building on well-established data mining methods is
proposed. A Cluster-based Temporal Representation of EveNt
Data (C-TREND) is introduced, a system that implements the
temporal cluster graph construct, which maps multi-attribute
temporal data to a two-dimensional directed graph that
identifies trends in dominant data types over time. C-TREND
provides an end user with the ability to generate graphs from
data and adjust graph parameters.
Keywords— Clustering, data and knowledge visualization, data
mining, interactive data exploration and discovery, temporal
data mining, trend analysis.
I. INTRODUCTION
BUSINESS intelligence applications represent an
important opportunity for data mining techniques to help
firms gather and analyze information about their
performance, customers, competitors, and business
environment. Knowledge representation and data
visualization tools constitute one form of business
intelligence techniques that present information to users in a
manner that supports business decision-making processes.
Business intelligence tools gain their strength by
supporting decision-makers. The research field of data
mining has developed a number of methods for identifying
patterns in data to provide insights and decision support to
users. Data mining and business intelligence approaches are
often used for class identification and data visualization in
1
R.Sajula Robin
P.G Scholar
Adhiyamaan College of Engg
Hosur – India
sajularobin@yahoo.co.in
knowledge management systems. Increasingly, knowledge
discovery in data (KDD) techniques are providing new
analytical structures that complement and sometimes
replace existing human-expert-based techniques to provide
improved support for decision making. Identifying and
visualizing temporal relationships (e.g., trends) in data
constitutes an important problem that is relevant in many
business, scientific, and academic settings.
Additionally, it is often desired to aggregate over
the temporal dimension (e.g., by day, month, quarter, year,
etc.) to match corporate reporting standards. Hence a new
technique is needed to mine the data according to specific
time periods and then compare the data mining results
across time periods to discover similarities. Mapping of the
multidimensional temporal data into an intuitive analytical
construct is known as temporal cluster graph.
In this paper the approach used for addressing
these types of issues is to mine the data according to
specific time periods and then compare the data mining
results across time periods to discover similarities. The main
contribution of this paper is to develop a novel and useful
approach for visualization and analysis of multiattribute
transactional data based on a new temporal cluster graph
construct, and to implement this approach as the Cluster-
based Temporal Representation of EveNt Data (C-TREND)
system.
Fig 1. Reducing multiattribute temporal complexity by
partitioning data into time periods and producing a temporal
cluster graph.
 Consider the plot of a retailer’s customers by age
and income over three months in Fig. 1. Xs represent
customers in the first month, triangles represent customers
in the second month, and circles represent customers in the
third month. An analyst may be tasked with the job of
discovering trends in customer type over these three
months.
In fig. 1a, the data are collected together. However
identifying patterns in the data and relationship overtime are
difficult.
In fig. 1b, the data are partitioned by time leads to
the identification of clusters within each period.
In fig 1c, the multidimensional temporal data are
mapped into an intuitive analytical construct known as
temporal cluster graph.
II. RELATED WORK
Some techniques related to this paper are discussed
below.
A. Temporal Data Mining
Temporal data mining is concerned with data
mining of large sequential data sets. By sequential data,
mean data that is ordered with respect to some index. For
example, time series constitute a popular class of sequential
data, where records are indexed by time.
Temporal data mining is an important extension as
it has the capability of mining activity rather than just states
and, thus, inferring relationships of contextual and temporal
proximity, some of which may also indicate a cause-effect
association. Moreover, temporal data mining has the ability
to mine the behavioral aspects of (communities of) objects
as opposed to simply mining rules that describe their states
at a point in time i.e., there is the promise of understanding
why rather than merely what. [1]
Many studies in conventional data mining
distinguish two strategic goals for the discovery process:
1) the description of the characteristics of a population and
2) the prediction of its evolution in the future. In the
context of the discovery of similarities in temporal
data, we categorize data mining research across
three dimensions: data type, mining paradigm,
and temporal ordering. [7]
Temporal data mining approaches depend on the
nature of the event sequence being studied.
Probably the most common form of temporal data
mining— time series analysis is used to mine
sequence ofcontinuous real-valued elements and
is often regression based, relying on the
prespecified definition of a model. Moreover,
standard time series analysis techniques typically
are examples of supervised learning; in other
words, they estimate the effects of a set of
independent variables on a dependent variable.
[5] Another
common area of temporal data mining research is
sequence analysis. Sequence analysis is often
used when the sequence is composed of a series
2
of nominal symbols. A sequential pattern is a
subsequence that appears frequently in a sequence database.
Sequential pattern mining , which finds the set of frequent
subsequences in sequence databases, is an important data
mining task and has broad applications, such as business
analysis, web mining, security, and bio-sequences analysis.
[6],[9]
B. Data Visualization
Visual data exploration [4] aims at integrating the
human in the data exploration process, applying its
perceptual abilities to the large data sets available in today's
computer systems. The basic idea of visual data exploration
is to present the data in some visual form, allowing the
human to get insight into the data, draw conclusions, and
directly interact with the data. Visual data exploration is
especially useful when little is known about the data and the
exploration goals are vague. Visual Data Exploration
usually follows a three step process: Overview, Zoom and
Filter, Details-on-Demand
First, the user needs to get an overview of the data.
In the overview, the user identifies interesting patterns and
focuses on one or more of them. For analyzing the patterns,
the user needs to drill down and access details of the data.
Visualization technology may be used for all three steps of
the data exploration process.
Visualization techniques are useful for showing an
overview of the data, allowing the user to identify
interesting subsets. In this step, it is important to keep the
overview visualization while focusing on the subset using
another visualization technique. An alternative is to distort
the overview visualization in order to focus on the
interesting subsets. To further explore the interesting
subsets, the user needs a drill-down capability in order to
get the details about the data. Visualization technology not
only provides the base visualization techniques for all three
steps, but also bridges the gaps between the steps.
The techniques can be classified based on three
criteria: 1) The data to be visualized.2) The visualization
technique.3) The interaction and distortion technique used.
Both scientific visualization and information
visualization create graphical models and visual
representations from data that support direct user interaction
for exploring and acquiring insight into useful information
embedded in the underlying data. In scientific visualization,
the graphical models are typically constructed from
measured or simulated data representing objects or concepts
associated with phenomena from the physical world. As
such, the data and, hence, its derived visual representations
represent objects that exist in a 1D (one-dimensional), 2D,
or 3D object space.[2]
Eventually, data will also include a temporal
dimension and the presence of spatial and temporal
dimensions is a determinant factor in deriving visual
representations from the data. In information visualization,
the graphical models may represent abstract concepts and
relationships that do not necessarily have a counterpart in
the physical world, e.g., information describing user
accesses to pages of an Internet portal or records describing
selected properties of different car brands and models.
Typically, each data unity describes multiple related
attributes (usually more than four) that are not of a spatial or
temporal nature. Interaction techniques provide user with
the ability to dynamically change visual representation and
can empower the users perception of information. A
comprehensive framework for user interface techniques
used in visualization system includes:1) Interactive Filtering
2) Interactive Zooming
Interactive Filtering: A number of interaction techniques
have been developed to improve interactive filtering in data
exploration. An example of an interactive tool which can be
used for interactive filtering is Magic Lenses. The basic idea
of Magic Lenses is to use a tool like a magnifying glass to
support filtering the data directly in the visualization. The
data under the magnifying glass is processed by the filter
and the result is displayed differently than the remaining
data set.
Interactive Zooming: Zooming is a well-known technique
which is widely used in a number of applications. In dealing
with large amounts of data, it is important to present the
data in a highly compressed form to provide an overview of
the data, but, at the same time, allow a variable display of
the data on different resolutions. Zooming not only means
to display the data objects larger, but also means that the
data representation automatically changes to present more
details on higher zoom levels.
III. TEMPORAL CLUSTER GRAPHS
Temporal cluster graph is a new data mining
technique for identifying and visualizing trends in
multiattribute temporal data. Temporal cluster graph
provide the user to adjust and visualize the clustering
solution for each partition. Hierarchal and graph-based
techniques are used by the temporal cluster graph to provide
interactive filtering and zooming capabilities for
visualization. The temporal cluster graph is a directed graph
that consists of a set of nodes V= {V1, V2… Vt}, where
each subset corresponds to a data partition and contains Ki
nodes.
A. Temporal Cluster Graph Definition
To obtain the graph several steps are required:
1. Transactional data set D is partitioned based on
time periods into t data subsets D1; . . .;Dt (indexed
chronologically), and each Di is a multiattribute data subset
containing records with m number of attributes.
2. Data within each partition is then clustered using
apriori algorithm.
3
3. The node Vi,j € {Vi} is the jth node in the ith
partition. Nodes are labeled with the Size of the cluster
they represent (i.e., the number of data point in that cluster).
4. Edges connect nodes in adjacent partitions and
are labeled with a distance value between the two nodes,
thus representing the similarity between the clusters
connected by the edge.
B. Graph Parameters
Three graph parameters are proposed for
displaying information at different levels of analysis:
1. Partition Zoom
2. within-Period Trend Strength
3. Cross-Period Trend Strength
C. Partition Zoom
Zoom feature has the ability to dynamically change
the size of the clustering solution in a data partition. The
zoom feature allows the users to apply their domain
expertise by adjusting in real time the underlying clustering
solution used to build a trend graph and interactively
evaluate multiple trend views.
Each data partition Di has a corresponding ki value,
where ki refers to the number of clusters estimated in the
clustering solution for that partition. For example, a value of
ki=5 corresponds to the clustering solution for the i th
partition that contains exactly five clusters.
D. Within-period Trend Strength
Within-period trend strength is a user specified
parameter that can be used to determine if nodes generated
by the clustering solution are “strong” enough to be
included in the trend analysis.
Within-period trend strength is denoted by
parameter α. Each data partition utilizes the same value of α.
By clustering each data partition the nodes in the trend
graph are created. For every data partition Di, the clustering
solution contains ki clusters , and some of these clusters can
be filtered out based on the within-period trend strength
parameter α.
E. Cross-Period Trend Strength
Cross-period trend strength is a user specified
parameter that can be used to filter out spurious edges based
on their weight. Cross-period trend strength is denoted by
parameter β.
An edge is included in the output graph if it
satisfies two criteria:
1.The edge is incident to two nodes that are both
included in the output graph (as determined by the
clustering solution and within-period trend strength α).
2. The edge weight is less than or equal to a
threshold η that depends on the cross-period trend strength
β.
The edge threshold η is calculated by taking the
average of the weights of all the possible edges among the
nodes in two adjacent data partitions (say, partitions i and
i+1) and adjusting it by the user-specified β parameter. Only
edges with weights below average are included in the graph.
V. C-TREND IMPLEMENTATION
A. C-TREND Overview
C-TREND,Cluster-based Temporal Representation
of EveNt Data, a new method for discovering and
visualizing trends and temporal patterns in transactional
attribute-value data that builds upon standard data mining
clustering techniques.
The C-TREND technique consists of two major
processes:
1) Offline preprocessing of the data
2) Online interactive analysis and visualization of the trends
Fig 2. The C-TREND Process
4
B. Offline Preprocessing of the Data
In the preprocessing phase, the data set is
partitioned based on time periods, and each partition is
clustered using one of many traditional clustering
techniques such as a hierarchical approach. The results of
the clustering for each partition are used to generate two
data structures: the node list and the edge list.
Creating these lists in the preprocessing phase
allows for more effective (real-time) visualization updates
of the C-TREND output graphs. Based on these data
structures, graph entities (nodes and edges) are generated
and rendered as a temporal cluster graph in the system
output window.
B1. Data Clustering
C-TREND can be implemented with multiple
different standard clustering algorithms (e.g., agglomerative
or divisive hierarchical clustering or partition- based
clustering) and could be expanded to include new efficient
clustering techniques such as the clustering by messaging
between data points technique. Specifically apriori
algorithm is utilized and the clustering is performed
separately for each partition of data.
APRIORI ALGORITHM
Apriori steps are as follows:
1) Counts item occurrences to determine the
frequent item sets
2) Candidates are generated.
3) Count the support of item sets pruning process
ensures candidate sizes are already known to be frequent
item sets.
4) Use the frequent item sets to generate the
desired rules.
Algorithm 1. Apriori
Ck: Candidate itemset of size k
Lk: frequent itemset of size k
L1= {frequent items};
for(k= 1; Lk!=∅; k++) do begin
Ck+1= candidates generated from Lk;
for each transaction tin database do
Increment the count of all candidates in Ck+1that are
contained in t
Lk+1= candidates in Ck+1with min_support
end
return kLk;
C-TREND produces a dendrogram for each data partition
and utilizes a global input value N that represents the
maximum-sized cluster solution maintained for each data
partition. A useful solution will consist of a set of N <<n
clusters (n is number of data points in partition i) and,
therefore, C-TREND has to store only 2N-1 nodes per
partition.
VI INTERACTIVE DATA VISUALIZATION
Interactive analysis includes the presentation of
output graphs in a graphical user interface(GUI) that allows
the user to adjust k for each partition and the α and β
parameters, Which prompts C-TREND to redraw the output
graph based on these new values in real time.
C-TREND utilizes a series of validation flags to
maintain and update the displayed state of the output trend
graph. Combinations of the validation flags are used to
determine whether or not each possible edge and node
should be displayed in the graph, and as these flags change,
the displayed components of the graph also change.
Each cluster in the node list (dendrogram data
structures) possesses two flags: k-pass and α-pass. These
flags are used to indicate whether the cluster should be
included in the output graph based on the ki value and the α
value, respectively. Specifically, when ki is changed, the
dendrogram data structure is updated so that only the
clusters that should be extracted for the clustering solution
of size ki have a valid k-pass flag. Similarly, when α is
changed, the dendrogram data structure is updated so that
only the clusters that are large enough to pass the node filter
based on α are assigned a valid α -pass flag.
The nodes that have both valid k-pass and α -pass
flags make up the set of nodes that are both large enough
and in the desired clustering solution and therefore are
included in the output graph.
VI CONCLUSION
By harnessing computational techniques of data
mining, we have developed a new temporal clustering
technique for discovering, analyzing, and visualizing trends
in multiattribute temporal data.
The proposed technique is versatile, and the
implementation of the technique as the C-TREND system
gives significant data representation power to the user—
domain experts have the ability to adjust parameters and
clustering mechanisms to fine-tune trend graphs.
The C-TREND implementation is scalable: the
time required to adjust trend parameters is quite low even
for larger data sets, which provides for real-time
visualization capabilities.
Furthermore, the proposed temporal clustering
analysis technique is applicable in many different data
analysis contexts and can provide insights for analysts
performing historical analyses and generating forecasts.
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