Discovering metric temporal constraint networks on temporal databases.

Objective: In this paper, we propose the ASTPminer algorithm for mining collections of time-stamped sequences to discover frequent temporal patterns, as represented in the simple temporal problem (STP) formalism: a representation of temporal knowledge as a set of event types and a set of metric temporal constraints among them. To focus the mining process, some initial knowledge can be provided by the user, also expressed as an STP, that acts as a seed pattern for the searching procedure. In this manner, the mining algorithm will search for those frequent temporal patterns consistent with the initial knowledge.