List of FAQs Concerning WUM

Why is WUM interesting?

Web usage analysis is important for several applications, including educational hypermedia and electronic commerce. Sequence mining is one of the techniques available for this analysis. WUM is a powerful sequence miner: it can discover complex sequence patterns and has a friendly interface for guiding the mining process.

What is the difference from other sequence miners?

Conventional sequence miners can only discover interesting sequences of adjacent events. However, an event occuring now depends on some of the previous events, rarely on all of them. So, some mechanism is needed to instruct the miner to ignore events. WUM offers such a mechanism: wildcards.

The MINT mining language looks like SQL. What is the difference?

The syntax of MINT reminds of SQL. This does not mean that there is a query processor below the parser. Recall that in MINT, we declare variables and specify constraints to hold for groups of sequences, without predetermining the sequence contents. This cannot be done in SQL, as much as it is not possible to perform association rule discovery with a conventional query processor.