Abstract
An efficient means of learning tree-structural features from tree-structured data would enable us to construct effective mining methods for tree-structured data. Here, a pattern representing rich tree-structural features common to tree-structured data and a polynomial time algorithm for learning important tree patterns are necessary for mining knowledge from tree-structured data. As such a tree pattern, we introduce a term tree pattern t such that any edge label of t belongs to a finite alphabet Λ, any internal vertex of t has ordered children and t has a new kind of structured variable, called a height-constrained variable. A height-constrained variable has a pair of integers (i, j) as constraints, and it can be replaced with a tree whose trunk length is at least i and whose height is at most j. This replacement is called height-constrained replacement. A sequence of consecutive height-constrained variables is called a variable-chain. In this paper, we present polynomial time algorithms for solving the membership problem and the minimal language (MINL) problem for term tree patternshaving no variable-chain. The membership problem for term tree patternsis to decide whether or not a given tree can be obtained from a given term tree pattern by applying height-constrained replacements to all height-constrained variables in the term tree pattern. The MINL problem for term tree patternsis to find a term tree pattern t such that the language generated by t is minimal among languages, generated by term tree patterns, which contain all given tree-structured data. Finally, we show that the class, i.e., the set of all term tree patternshaving no variable-chain, is polynomial time inductively inferable from positive data if |Λ| ≥ 2.
