High-utility sequential pattern mining (HUSPM) has emerged as an important topic due to its wide application and considerable popularity. However, due to the combinatorial explosion of the search space when the HUSPM problem encounters a low-utility threshold or large-scale data, it may be time-consuming and memory-costly to address the HUSPM problem. Several algorithms have been proposed for addressing this problem, but they still cost a lot in terms of running time and memory usage. In this article, to further solve this problem efficiently, we design a compact structure called sequence projection (seqPro) and propose an efficient algorithm, namely, discovering high-utility sequential patterns with the seqPro structure (HUSP-SP). HUSP-SP utilizes the compact seq-array to store the necessary information in a sequence database. The seqPro structure is designed to efficiently calculate candidate patterns’ utilities and upper-bound values. Furthermore, a new upper bound on utility, namely, tighter reduced sequence utility and two pruning strategies in search space, are utilized to improve the mining performance of HUSP-SP. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-life datasets show that HUSP-SP can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of running time, memory usage, search space pruning efficiency, and scalability.

Utility mining has emerged as an important and interesting topic owing to its wide application and considerable popularity. However, conventional utility mining methods have a bias toward items that have longer on-shelf time as they have a greater chance to generate a high utility. To eliminate the bias, the problem of on-shelf utility mining (OSUM) is introduced. In this article, we focus on the task of OSUM of sequence data, where the sequential database is divided into several partitions according to time periods and items are associated with utilities and several on-shelf time periods. To address the problem, we propose two methods, OSUM of sequence data (OSUMS) and OSUMS + , to extract on-shelf high-utility sequential patterns. For further efficiency, we also design several strategies to reduce the search space and avoid redundant calculation with two upper bounds time prefix extension utility ( TPEU ) and time reduced sequence utility ( TRSU ). In addition, two novel data structures are developed for facilitating the calculation of upper bounds and utilities. Substantial experimental results on certain real and synthetic datasets show that the two methods outperform the state-of-the-art algorithm. In conclusion, OSUMS may consume a large amount of memory and is unsuitable for cases with limited memory, while OSUMS + has wider real-life applications owing to its high efficiency.