Sqn2Vec: learning sequence representation via sequential patterns with a gap constraint

When learning sequence representations, traditional pattern-based methods often suffer from the data sparsity and high-dimensionality problems while recent neural embedding methods often fail on sequential datasets with a small vocabulary. To address these disadvantages, we propose an unsupervised method (named Sqn2Vec) which first leverages sequential patterns (SPs) to increase the vocabulary size and then learns low-dimensional continuous vectors for sequences via a neural embedding model. Moreover, our method enforces a gap constraint among symbols in sequences to obtain meaningful and discriminative SPs. Consequently, Sqn2Vec produces significantly better sequence representations than a comprehensive list of state-of-the-art baselines, particularly on sequential datasets with a relatively small vocabulary. We demonstrate the superior performance of Sqn2Vec in several machine learning tasks including sequence classification, clustering, and visualization.