Plan Mining by Divide-and-Conquer

Plans or sequences of actions are an important form of data With the proliferation of database technology plan databases or planbases are increasingly common E cient discovery of important patterns of actions in plan databases presents a challenge to data mining In this paper we present a method for mining signi cant patterns of successful actions in a large planbase using a divide and conquer strategy The method exploits multi dimensional generalization of sequences of actions and extracts the inherent hierarchical structure and sequential patterns of plans at di erent levels of abstraction These patterns are used in turn to subsequently narrow down the search for more speci c patterns The process is analogous to the use of divide and conquer methods in hierarchical planning We illustrate our approach using a travel planning database