Mining Event Histories

The Biomining Project

Mining Event Histories: Towards new insights on personal Swiss life courses

SNF project FN-100012-113998 (2007-2009) and FN-100015-122230 (2009-2011)

This project has a double purpose. The first is a methodological one. We intend to explore and develop ``data mining'' approaches for discovering interesting knowledge from individual longitudinal data and especially life event histories. The second goal, which responds to a socio-demographic concern, is to gain new original insights on how socio-demographic, familial, educational and professional events are entwined, on what are the characteristics of typical Swiss life trajectories and on changes in these characteristics over time. Special emphasize will be put on broken lives and life disruptive events. The applied part will be essentially based on the data from the Swiss Household Panel, and more specifically on the retrospective biographical survey conducted in 2001/2002.

Team:
- Main applicant: Gilbert Ritschard, PO
- Co-applicant: Eric D. Widmer, PO
- Alexis Gabadinho
- Nicolas S. Müller
- Matthias Studer
TraMineR, a R toolbox for sequence analysis.
- TraMineR download page

Slides
- Mining Event Histories: Some New Insights on Personal Swiss Life Courses, PaVie Research Seminar, Lausanne, October 22, 2008.
  printable version: 6 slides per page
- Extracting knowledge from life courses: clustering and visualization, 10th International Conference on Data Warehousing and Knowledge Discovery, DAWAK 2008, Turin, Italy, September 2-5, 2008.
  printable version: 6 slides per page
- Mining Event or State Sequences: A Social Science Perspective, invited talk at the 16th International Conference on Intelligent Information Systems IIS 2008, Zakopane, Poland, June 16-18, 2008.
  printable version: 6 slides per page
- Workshop on Sequential data analysis, University of Lund, Sweden, May 8-9, 2008
  - Tree structure and mobility trees
    printable version: 4 slides per page
  - Rendering sequences
    printable version: 4 slides per page
  - Marriage survival
    printable version: 4 slides per page
- Evolution of the Swiss Familial Life Course: Learning from innovative approaches in sequence analysis, Séminaire de recherche du Laboratoire de démographie et d'études familiales (LaboDemo), University of Geneva, April 22, 2008.
  printable version: 4 slides per page
- Mining event histories: A social scientist view, invited talk at the IASC 2007 Conference on Statistics for data mining, learning and knowledge extraction, Aveiro, Portugal, August 30 - September 1, 2007.
  printable version: 6 slides per page
Publications
- Studer, M., G. Ritschard, A. Gabadinho and N.S. Müller (2010), Discrepancy analysis of complex objects using dissimilarities in F. Guillet et al. (eds) Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Management, Series: Studies in Computational Intelligence, Vol. 292, Berlin: Springer. pp. 3-19. doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-00580-0_1. Preprint (pdf).
- Gabadinho, A., G. Ritschard, M. Studer et N.S. Müller, (2010), Indice de complexité pour le tri et la comparaison de séquences catégorielles, Revue des Nouvelles Technologies de l'Information, Vol. E-19, EGC 2010, pp. 61-66. Preprint (pdf).
- Müller, N.S., M. Studer, G. Ritschard et A. Gabadinho (2010), Extraction de règles d'association séquentielle à l'aide de modèles semi-paramétriques à risques proportionnels, Revue des Nouvelles Technologies de l'Information, Vol. E-19, EGC 2010, pp. 25-36. Preprint (pdf).
- Müller, N.S., M. Studer, A. Gabadinho et G. Ritschard (2010), Analyse de séquences d'événements avec TraMineR, Revue des Nouvelles Technologies de l'Information, Vol. E-19, EGC 2010, pp. 639-640. Preprint (pdf).
- Studer, M., N.S. Müller, N.S., G. Ritschard et A. Gabadinho (2010), Classer, discriminer et visualiser des séquences d'événements, Revue des Nouvelles Technologies de l'Information, Vol. E-19, EGC 2010, pp. 37-48. Preprint (pdf).
- Widmer, E., G. Ritschard et N.S. Müller (2009), Trajectoires professionnelles et familiales en Suisse : quelle pluralisation ? in M. Oris et al. (eds) Transitions dans le parcours de vie et construction des inégalités, Lausanne: Presses Polytechniques Universitaires Romandes, 253-272. Preprint (pdf).
- Gabadinho, A., G. Ritschard, M. Studer and N.S. Müller (2009), Summarizing Sets of Categorical Sequences, in INSTICC Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval, KDIR 2009, Madeira, 6 - 8 October, 2009, Portugal, INSTICC, 62-69. Preprint (pdf).
- Widmer, E. and G. Ritschard (2009), The De-Standardization of the Life Course: Are Men and Women Equal?, Advances in Life course Research, 14(1-2), 28-39, doi: 10.1016/j.alcr.2009.04.001. Preprint (pdf).
- Gabadinho, A., G. Ritschard, M. Studer and N.S. Müller (2009), Mining sequence data in R with the TraMineR package: A user's guide (v1.1), University of Geneva, January 2009, 129 pages. (pdf).
- Studer, M., G. Ritschard, A. Gabadinho et N.S. Müller (2009), Analyse de dissimilarités par arbre d'induction, Revue des Nouvelles Technologies de l'Information, E-15, EGC'2009, 7-18. Preprint (pdf).
- Gabadinho, A., N.S. Müller, G. Ritschard et M. Studer, (2009), TraMineR: une librairie R pour l'analyse de données séquentielles, Revue des Nouvelles Technologies de l'Information, E-15, EGC'2009, p. 483. Preprint (pdf).
- Ritschard, G., A. Gabadinho, M. Studer and N.S. Müller (2009), Converting between various sequence representations, in Z. Ras and A. Dardzinska (eds), Advances in Data Management, Series Studies in Computational Intelligence, Vol. 223. Berlin: Springer 155-175. Preprint (pdf) 21p.
- Ritschard, G., A. Gabadinho, N.S. Müller and M. Studer (2008), Mining event sequences: A social science perspective, International Journal of Data Mining, Modelling and Management, IJDMMM, 1(1), 68-90, doi: 10.1504/IJDMMM.2008.022538. Preprint (pdf).
- Gabadinho, A., G. Ritschard, M. Studer and N.S. Müller (2008), Mining sequence data in R with the TraMineR package: A user's guide, University of Geneva, July 2008, 99 pages. (pdf).
- Widmer, E. et G. Ritschard (2008), Trajectoires professionnelles et familiales en Suisse : quelle pluralisation ?, in Colloque lémanique IRIS « Transitions dans le parcours de vie et construction des inégalités », Genève, 20-21 juin 2008 (Colloque IRIS 2008). Preprint (pdf).
- Müller, N.S., A. Gabadinho, G. Ritschard and M. Studer (2008), Extracting knowledge from life courses: Clustering and visualization, in Data Warehousing and Knowledge Discovery, 10th International Conference DaWaK 2008, Turin, Italy, September 2-5, LNCS 5182, Berlin: Springer, 176-185. Preprint (pdf).
- Müller, N.S., S. Lespinats, G. Ritschard, M. Studer et A. Gabadinho (2008), Visualisation et classification des parcours de vie, Revue des Nouvelles Technologies de l'Information, E-11 (vol. II), EGC'2008, 499-510. Preprint (pdf).
- Studer, M., A. Gabadinho, N.S. Müller et G. Ritschard (2008), Approches de type n-grammes pour l'analyse de parcours de vie familiaux, Revue des Nouvelles Technologies de l'Information, E-11 (vol. II), EGC'2008, 511-522. Preprint (pdf).
- Müller, N.S., M. Studer et G. Ritschard, G. (2007), Classification de parcours de vie à l'aide de l'optimal matching, XIVe Rencontre de la Société francophone de classification (SFC 2007), Paris, 5-7 septembre 2007, 157-160. Preprint (pdf) 4p.
- Ritschard, G. (2007), Mining event histories: A social scientist view, invited talk at the IASC 2007 Conference on Statistics for data mining, learning and knowledge extraction, Aveiro, Portugal, August 30 - September 1, 2007. Preprint (pdf) 14p.
- Studer, M. and N.S. Müller and G. Ritschard (2007), Understanding the KDE Social Structure through Mining of Email Archive, 2nd Workshop on Public Data about Software Development (WoPDaSD 2007), Third International Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS), Limerick, Ireland, June 11-14, 2007. Preprint (pdf) 11p.
- Ritschard, G., M. Studer, N.S. Müller and A. Gabadinho (2007), Comparing and classifying personal life courses: From time to event methods to sequence analysis, COST Action A34 Gender and Well-Being, Second Symposium, University of Minho, Guimaraes, Portugal, April 25-27, 2007. (pdf) 16p.
Tutorials
- Two tutorials on Sequential data were given (in French) at the EGC 2009 Conference in Strasbourg, January 27-30, 2009.
  In the first one we introduce the concepts and principles of sequential data analysis. In the second one we initiate participants to the practice of Sequential data analysis in R with our TraMineR package.
- Module de l'Ecole doctorale PaVie sur l'Analyse de données séquentielles dans R (TraMineR), Genève, 18-19 novembre 2009.
Links
- SHP Swiss Household Panel
- Elzinga's home page (where you can download the CHESA program)
- Poetter and Rohwer's working group on Statistical Concepts and Models for Social Research (where you can download the TDA program)
- R, The R-Project for Statistical Computing. R is a the free open-source statistical environment for which TraMineR was developed.

Last modified: April 15, 2008.