Sequence Graph Transform (SGT): A Feature Extraction Function for Sequence Data Mining (Extended Version)

The ubiquitous presence of sequence data across fields such as the web, healthcare, bioinformatics, and text mining has made sequence mining a vital research area. However, sequence mining is particularly challenging because of difficulty in finding (dis)similarity/distance between sequences. This is because a distance measure between sequences is not obvious due to their unstructuredness---arbitrary strings of arbitrary length. Feature representations, such as n-grams, are often used but they either compromise on extracting both short- and long-term sequence patterns or have a high computation. We propose a new function, Sequence Graph Transform (SGT), that extracts the short- and long-term sequence features and embeds them in a finite-dimensional feature space. Importantly, SGT has low computation and can extract any amount of short- to long-term patterns without any increase in the computation, also proved theoretically in this paper. Due to this, SGT yields superior result with significantly higher accuracy and lower computation compared to the existing methods. We show it via several experimentation and SGT's real world application for clustering, classification, search and visualization as examples.