Novel techniques and an efficient algorithm for closed pattern mining

•Frequent closed itemset mining and biclustering can be reduced to the same problem.•A new and efficient algorithm for mining frequent closed patterns is presented.•We introduce a unique approach to transform {-1,0,1}-type data into binary format.•We propose an original aggregation method to detect the most meaningful patterns.•We offer a novel technique for visualization of biclustering results.

In this paper we show that frequent closed itemset mining and biclustering, the two most prominent application fields in pattern discovery, can be reduced to the same problem when dealing with binary (0–1) data. FCPMiner, a new powerful pattern mining method, is then introduced to mine such data efficiently. The uniqueness of the proposed method is its extendibility to non-binary data. The mining method is coupled with a novel visualization technique and a pattern aggregation method to detect the most meaningful, non-overlapping patterns. The proposed methods are rigorously tested on both synthetic and real data sets.