Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Pattern Discovery In Structural Databases With Applications To Bioinformatics, Sen Zhang

Dissertations

Frequent structure mining (FSM) aims to discover and extract patterns frequently occurring in structural data such as trees and graphs. FSM finds many applications in bioinformatics, XML processing, Web log analysis, and so on. In this thesis, two new FSM techniques are proposed for finding patterns in unordered labeled trees. Such trees can be used to model evolutionary histories of different species, among others.

The first FSM technique finds cousin pairs in the trees. A cousin pair is a pair of nodes sharing the same parent, the same grandparent, or the same great-grandparent, etc. Given a tree T, our …