Modeling and Managing Heterogeneous Patterns: The PSYCHO Experience

Abstract

Patterns can be defined as concise, but rich in semantics, representations of data. Due to pattern characteristics, ad-hoc systems are required for pattern management, in order to deal with them in an efficient and effective way. Several approaches have been proposed, both by scientific and industrial communities, to cope with pattern management problems. Unfortunately, most of them deal with few types of patterns and mainly concern extraction issues. Little effort has been posed in defining an overall framework dedicated to the management of different types of patterns, possibly user-defined, in a homogeneous way. In this chapter we present PSYCHO (Pattern based SYstem arCHitecture prOtotype), a system prototype providing an integrated environment for generating, representing, and manipulating heterogeneous patterns, possibly user-defined. After presenting PSYCHO logical model and architecture, we will focus on several examples of its usage concerning common market basket analysis patterns, i.e. association rules and clusters.