BP-growth: Searching strategies for efficient behavior pattern mining

User habit mining plays an important role in user understanding, which is critical for improving a wide range of personalized intelligence services. Recently, some researchers proposed to mine user behavior patterns which characterize the habits of mobile users and account for the associations between user interactions and context captured by mobile devices. However, the existing approaches for mining these behavior patterns are not practical in mobile environments due to limited computing resources on mobile devices. To fulfill this crucial void, we investigate optimizing strategies which can be used for improving the efficiency of behavior pattern mining in terms of computing and memory needs. Specifically, we examine typical optimizing strategies for association rule mining and study the feasibility of applying them to behavior pattern mining, since these two problems are similar in many aspects. Moreover, we develop an efficient algorithm, named BP-Growth, for behavior pattern mining by combining two promising strategies. Finally, experimental results show that BP-Growth outperforms benchmark methods with a significant margin in terms of both computing and memory cost.