Traditional education has been updated with the development of information technology in human history. Within big data and cyber-physical systems, the Metaverse has generated strong interest in various applications (e.g., entertainment, business, and cultural travel) over the last decade. As a novel social work idea, the Metaverse consists of many kinds of technologies, e.g., big data, interaction, artificial intelligence, game design, Internet computing, Internet of Things, and blockchain. It is foreseeable that the usage of Metaverse will contribute to educational development. However, the architectures of the Metaverse in education are not yet mature enough. There are many questions we should address for the Metaverse in education. To this end, this paper aims to provide a systematic literature review of Metaverse in education. This paper is a comprehensive survey of the Metaverse in education, with a focus on current technologies, challenges, opportunities, and future directions. First, we present a brief overview of the Metaverse in education, as well as the motivation behind its integration. Then, we survey some important characteristics for the Metaverse in education, including the personal teaching environment and the personal learning environment. Next, we envisage what variations of this combination will bring to education in the future and discuss their strengths and weaknesses. We also review the state-of-the-art case studies (including technical companies and educational institutions) for Metaverse in education. Finally, we point out several challenges and issues in this promising area.

To mine potential and helpful patterns, the majority of studies on pattern discovery from databases have been conducted in the last few decades. They have several obvious drawbacks: 1) Each thing stands out on its own and varies in significance based on factors including utility, risk, interest, and weight. 2) In specific application settings, an object has a favorable or unfavorable effect (e.g., products are often cross-sold and have positive or negative unit profits, which affect benefits). 3) The user could not have all the necessary information because frequent-based patterns typically only include a small percentage of the relevant patterns (for example, occupancy). To address this issue, we apply economic utility theory to the database and data mining fields. We provide a one-phase approach called pnHUO for discovering High Utility Occupancy patterns with positive and negative utility values that beyond frequency and usefulness. According to user interests, frequency, and utility occupancy, there are various utility occupancy patterns with positive and negative utility values. To hold the necessary data, a new frequency-utility tree and an indexed data structure called a positive-and-negative utility-occupancy list are created during the mining process. A number of pruning strategies are further developed using the determined upper bound of utility occupancy to reduce the search space. To evaluate the usefulness and efficiency of the suggested algorithm, five real datasets were tested in experiments, and the results were positive.

Knowledge extraction from database is the fundamental task in database and data mining community, which has been applied to a wide range of real-world applications and situations. Different from the support-based mining models, the utility-oriented mining framework integrates the utility theory to provide more informative and useful patterns. Time-dependent sequence data are commonly seen in real life. Sequence data have been widely utilized in many applications, such as analyzing sequential user behavior on the Web, influence maximization, route planning, and targeted marketing. Unfortunately, all the existing algorithms lose sight of the fact that the processed data not only contain rich features (e.g., occur quantity, risk, and profit), but also may be associated with multi-dimensional auxiliary information, e.g., transaction sequence can be associated with purchaser profile information. In this article, we first formulate the problem of utility mining across multi-dimensional sequences, and propose a novel framework named MDUS to extract Multi-Dimensional Utility-oriented Sequential useful patterns. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that incorporates the time-dependent sequence-order, quantitative information, utility factor, and auxiliary dimension. Two algorithms respectively named MDUS EM and MDUS SD are presented to address the formulated problem. The former algorithm is based on database transformation, and the later one performs pattern joins and a searching method to identify desired patterns across multi-dimensional sequences. Extensive experiments are carried on six real-life datasets and one synthetic dataset to show that the proposed algorithms can effectively and efficiently discover the useful knowledge from multi-dimensional sequential databases. Moreover, the MDUS framework can provide better insight, and it is more adaptable to real-life situations than the current existing models.

The main purpose of data mining and analytics is to find novel, potentially useful patterns that can be utilized in real-world applications to derive beneficial knowledge. For identifying and evaluating the usefulness of different kinds of patterns, many techniques and constraints have been proposed, such as support, confidence, sequence order, and utility parameters (e.g., weight, price, profit, quantity, satisfaction, etc.). In recent years, there has been an increasing demand for utility-oriented pattern mining (UPM, or called utility mining). UPM is a vital task, with numerous high-impact applications, including cross-marketing, e-commerce, finance, medical, and biomedical applications. This survey aims to provide a general, comprehensive, and structured overview of the state-of-the-art methods of UPM. First, we introduce an in-depth understanding of UPM, including concepts, examples, and comparisons with related concepts. A taxonomy of the most common and state-of-the-art approaches for mining different kinds of high-utility patterns is presented in detail, including Apriori-based, tree-based, projection-based, vertical-/horizontal-data-format-based, and other hybrid approaches. A comprehensive review of advanced topics of existing high-utility pattern mining techniques is offered, with a discussion of their pros and cons. Finally, we present several well-known open-source software packages for UPM. We conclude our survey with a discussion on open and practical challenges in this field.

Sequence data, e.g., complex event sequence, is more commonly seen than other types of data (e.g., transaction data) in real-world applications. For the mining task from sequence data, several problems have been formulated, such as sequential pattern mining, episode mining, and sequential rule mining. As one of the fundamental problems, episode mining has often been studied. The common wisdom is that discovering frequent episodes is not useful enough. In this paper, we propose an efficient utility mining approach namely UMEpi: Utility Mining of high-utility Episodes from complex event sequence. We propose the concept of remaining utility of episode, and achieve a tighter upper bound, namely episode-weighted utilization (EWU), which will provide better pruning. Thus, the optimized EWU-based pruning strategy can achieve better improvements in mining efficiency. Finally, experiments on two real-life datasets demonstrate that UMEpi can discover the complete high-utility episodes from complex event sequence, while state-of-the-art algorithms fail to return the correct results. Besides, the improved variants of UMEpi outperforms the baseline.

With the growing popularity of shared resources, large volumes of complex data of different types are collected automatically. Traditional data mining algorithms generally have problems and challenges including huge memory cost, low processing speed, and inadequate hard disk space. As a fundamental task of data mining, sequential pattern mining (SPM) is used in a wide variety of real-life applications. However, it is more complex and challenging than other pattern mining tasks, i.e., frequent itemset mining and association rule mining, and also suffers from the above challenges when handling the large-scale data. To solve these problems, mining sequential patterns in a parallel or distributed computing environment has emerged as an important issue with many applications. In this article, an in-depth survey of the current status of parallel SPM (PSPM) is investigated and provided, including detailed categorization of traditional serial SPM approaches, and state-of-the art PSPM. We review the related work of PSPM in details including partition-based algorithms for PSPM, apriori-based PSPM, pattern-growth-based PSPM, and hybrid algorithms for PSPM, and provide deep description (i.e., characteristics, advantages, disadvantages, and summarization) of these parallel approaches of PSPM. Some advanced topics for PSPM, including parallel quantitative/weighted/utility SPM, PSPM from uncertain data and stream data, hardware acceleration for PSPM, are further reviewed in details. Besides, we review and provide some well-known open-source software of PSPM. Finally, we summarize some challenges and opportunities of PSPM in the big data era.

In the field of data mining, many utility-oriented mining approaches have been extensively studied. Previous studies have, however, the limitation that they rarely consider the inherent correlation of items among the discovered patterns. For example, from the purchase behavior, a high-utility group of products (w.r.t. multi-products) may contain the items with both high or low utility. This pattern is also considered as a valuable pattern even if they may not be highly correlated, or even happened together by the chance. In this paper, we propose an efficient utility mining approach namely non-redundant Correlated high-Utility Pattern Miner (CoUPM) by considering both strong positive correlation and profitable value of the products. The derived patterns with high utility and strong correlation can lead to more insightful availability than those patterns only have high utility values. The utility-list structure is maintained and applied to store necessary information of correlation and utility. Several pruning strategies are further developed to improve the efficiency for discovering the desired patterns. Experimental results show that the non-redundant correlated high-utility patterns have more effectiveness than some other kinds of patterns. Moreover, the proposed CoUPM algorithm significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithm.

In big data era, the collected data usually contains rich information and hidden knowledge. Utility-oriented pattern mining and analytics have shown a powerful ability to explore these ubiquitous data, which may be collected from various fields and applications, such as market basket analysis, retail, click-stream analysis, medical analysis, and bioinformatics. However, analysis of these data with sensitive private information raises privacy concerns. To achieve better trade-off between utility maximizing and privacy preserving, Privacy-Preserving Utility Mining (PPUM) has become a critical issue in recent years. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of PPUM. We first present the background of utility mining, privacy-preserving data mining and PPUM, then introduce the related preliminaries and problem formulation of PPUM, as well as some key evaluation criteria for PPUM. In particular, we present and discuss the current state-of-the-art PPUM algorithms, as well as their advantages and deficiencies in detail. Finally, we highlight and discuss some technical challenges and open directions for future research on PPUM.