{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.020765027322404372, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 4.7974683544303796, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Semantics of negative sequential patterns

In the field of pattern mining, a negative sequential pattern is specified by means of a sequence consisting of events to occur and of other events, called negative events, to be absent. For instance, containment of the pattern $\langle a\ \neg b\ c\rangle$ arises with an occurrence of a and a subsequent occurrence of c but no occurrence of b in between. This article is to shed light on the ambiguity of such a seemingly intuitive notation and we identify eight possible semantics for the containment relation between a pattern and a sequence. These semantics are illustrated and formally studied, in particular we propose dominance and equivalence relations between them. Also we prove that support is anti-monotonic for some of these semantics. Some of the results are discussed with the aim of developing algorithms to extract efficiently frequent negative patterns.