With the advent of big data, periodic pattern mining has demonstrated significant value in real-world applications, including smart home systems, healthcare systems, and the medical field. However, advances in network technology have enabled malicious actors to extract sensitive information from publicly available datasets, posing significant threats to data providers and, in severe cases, hindering societal development. To mitigate such risks, privacy-preserving utility mining (PPUM) has been proposed. However, PPUM is unsuitable for addressing privacy concerns in periodic information mining. To address this issue, we innovatively extend the existing PPUM framework and propose two algorithms, Maximum sensitive Utility-MAximum maxPer item (MU-MAP) and Maximum sensitive Utility-MInimum maxPer item (MU-MIP). These algorithms aim to hide sensitive periodic high-utility itemsets while generating sanitized datasets. To enhance the efficiency of the algorithms, we designed two novel data structures: the Sensitive Itemset List (SISL) and the Sensitive Item List (SIL), which store essential information about sensitive itemsets and their constituent items. Moreover, several performance metrics were employed to evaluate the performance of our algorithms compared to the state-of-the-art PPUM algorithms. The experimental results show that our proposed algorithms achieve an Artificial Cost (AC) value of 0 on all datasets when hiding sensitive itemsets. In contrast, the traditional PPUM algorithm yields non-zero AC. This indicates that our algorithms can successfully hide sensitive periodic itemsets without introducing misleading patterns, whereas the PPUM algorithm generates additional itemsets that may interfere with user decision-making. Moreover, the results also reveal that our algorithms maintain Database Utility Similarity (DUS) of over 90% after the sensitive itemsets are hidden. The code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/DSI-Lab1/PPUM.

Viruses represent the most abundant biological entities and play pivotal roles in microbial ecosystems. As prominent human pathogens, they are closely linked to human morbidity and mortality. Accurate identification of viral sequences from viral genome sequences is essential, yet existing genome-based mod-els-mainly relying on composition or frequency features-often show limited interpretability and lower accuracy, especially on complex or imbalanced datasets. To address these limitations, we propose GeneNSPCla (Genomic Negative Sequential Patternbased Classification), a novel viral classification framework based on negative sequential patterns (NSPs) that extracts discriminative absence-based features from nucleotide sequences of RNA viral genomes. By transforming these NSPs into numerical feature vectors and integrating them into multiple supervised classifiers, GeneNSPCla effectively captures both presence and absence signals in viral sequences. Furthermore, we propose a negative pattern mining algorithm, GONPM, for processing genomic data, which can discover longer and more biologically meaningful negative sequential patterns. The experimental results demonstrate that the average accuracy of GONPM in 8 classifiers has improved by 5.25 % compared to the original negative pattern mining algorithm and by 19.97 % compared to the positive pattern mining algorithm. These findings highlight the effectiveness of incorporating absence-based sequential information, providing a new and complementary perspective for viral genome analysis and classification.

The development of e-marketing over recent decades has led offline and online retail enterprises to adopt various data analysis technologies to enhance their understanding of consumer behavior and increase revenue. One common approach involves segmenting consumers into distinct groups based on designed metrics, targeting high-value segments for specialized services. To evaluate customer worthiness, the popular RFM model uses three dimensions: recency (the time since their last purchase), frequency (how often they make purchases), and monetary value (total spending). Higher scores under this model are indicative of greater potential profitability for businesses. While this approach provides valuable insights, it may not fully capture all profitable customer behaviors accurately. To address these limitations, this paper introduces a new model, namely the RFMI (i.e., recency, frequency, monetary, and interval) model, for comprehensively evaluating customer value. The new model employs an analytic hierarchy process to derive the RFMI values of customers. Subsequently, we employ K-means clustering customers to group customers into six segments. Moreover, the experimental dataset was sourced from a real UK e-commerce platform. The experimental results indicate that the new model effectively distinguishes between various consumption patterns among customers. This enhanced understanding can enable retailers to improve their marketing strategies more precisely, optimize customer service, and increase profitability.

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, large language models (LLMs) have become a hot research topic. Education plays an important role in human social development and progress. Traditional education faces challenges such as individual student differences, insufficient allocation of teaching resources, and assessment of teaching effectiveness. Therefore, the applications of LLMs in the field of digital/smart education have broad prospects. The research on educational large models (EduLLMs) is constantly evolving, providing new methods and approaches to achieve personalized learning, intelligent tutoring, and educational assessment goals, thereby improving the quality of education and the learning experience. This article aims to investigate and summarize the application of LLMs in smart education. It first introduces the research background and motivation of LLMs and explains the essence of LLMs. It then discusses the relationship between digital education and EduLLMs and summarizes the current research status of educational large models. The main contributions are the systematic summary and vision of the research background, motivation, and application of large models for education (LLM4Edu). By reviewing existing research, this article provides guidance and insights for educators, researchers, and policy-makers to gain a deep understanding of the potential and challenges of LLM4Edu. It further provides guidance for further advancing the development and application of LLM4Edu, while still facing technical, ethical, and practical challenges requiring further research and exploration.

Human-computer interaction (HCI) emerged with the birth of the computer and has been upgraded through decades of development. Metaverse has attracted a lot of interest with its immersive experience, and HCI is the entrance to the Metaverse for people. It is predictable that HCI will determine the immersion of the Metaverse. However, the technologies of HCI in Metaverse are not mature enough. There are many issues that we should address for HCI in the Metaverse. To this end, the purpose of this paper is to provide a systematic literature review on the key technologies and applications of HCI in the Metaverse. This paper is a comprehensive survey of HCI for the Metaverse, focusing on current technology, future directions, and challenges. First, we provide a brief overview of HCI in the Metaverse and their mutually exclusive relationships. Then, we summarize the evolution of HCI and its future characteristics in the Metaverse. Next, we envision and present the key technologies involved in HCI in the Metaverse. We also review recent case studies of HCI in the Metaverse. Finally, we highlight several challenges and future issues in this promising area.

The aim of sequential pattern mining (SPM) is to discover potentially useful information from a given sequence. Although various SPM methods have been investigated, most of these focus on mining all of the patterns. However, users sometimes want to mine patterns with the same specific prefix pattern, called co-occurrence pattern. Since sequential rule mining can make better use of the results of SPM, and obtain better recommendation performance, this paper addresses the issue of maximal co-occurrence nonoverlapping sequential rule (MCoR) mining and proposes the MCoR-Miner algorithm. To improve the efficiency of support calculation, MCoR-Miner employs depth-first search and backtracking strategies equipped with an indexing mechanism to avoid the use of sequential searching. To obviate useless support calculations for some sequences, MCoR-Miner adopts a filtering strategy to prune the sequences without the prefix pattern. To reduce the number of candidate patterns, MCoR-Miner applies the frequent item and binomial enumeration tree strategies. To avoid searching for the maximal rules through brute force, MCoR-Miner uses a screening strategy. To validate the performance of MCoR-Miner, eleven competitive algorithms were conducted on eight sequences. Our experimental results showed that MCoR-Miner outperformed other competitive algorithms, and yielded better recommendation performance than frequent co-occurrence pattern mining. All algorithms and datasets can be downloaded fromhttps://github.com/wuc567/Pattern-Mining/tree/master/MCoR-Miner.

Metaverse is a living space and cyberspace that realizes the process of virtualizing and digitizing the real world. It integrates a plethora of existing technologies with the goal of being able to map the real world, even beyond the real world. Metaverse has a bright future and is expected to have many applications in various scenarios. The support of the Metaverse is based on numerous related technologies becoming mature. Hence, there is no doubt that the security risks of the development of the Metaverse may be more prominent and more complex. We present some Metaverse-related technologies and some potential security and privacy issues in the Metaverse. We present current solutions for Metaverse security and privacy derived from these technologies. In addition, we also raise some unresolved questions about the potential Metaverse. To summarize, this survey provides an in-depth review of the security and privacy issues raised by key technologies in Metaverse applications. We hope that this survey will provide insightful research directions and prospects for the Metaverse's development, particularly in terms of security and privacy protection in the Metaverse.