A weighted common structure based clustering technique for XML documents

XML has recently become very popular as a means of representing semistructured data and as a standard for data exchange over the Web, because of its varied applicability in numerous applications. Therefore, XML documents constitute an important data mining domain. In this paper, we propose a new method of XML document clustering by a global criterion function, considering the weight of common structures. Our approach initially extracts representative structures of frequent patterns from schemaless XML documents using a sequential pattern mining algorithm. Then, we perform clustering of an XML document by the weight of common structures, without a measure of pairwise similarity, assuming that an XML document is a transaction and frequent structures extracted from documents are items of the transaction. We conducted experiments to compare our method with previous methods. The experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach. Crown Copyright (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.