  Nowadays data sets are available in very complex and heterogeneous ways.
Mining of such data collections is essential to support many real-world
applications ranging from healthcare to marketing. In this work, we focus on
the analysis of "complex" sequential data by means of interesting sequential
patterns. We approach the problem using the elegant mathematical framework of
Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) and its extension based on "pattern structures".
Pattern structures are used for mining complex data (such as sequences or
graphs) and are based on a subsumption operation, which in our case is defined
with respect to the partial order on sequences. We show how pattern structures
along with projections (i.e., a data reduction of sequential structures), are
able to enumerate more meaningful patterns and increase the computing
efficiency of the approach. Finally, we show the applicability of the presented
method for discovering and analyzing interesting patient patterns from a French
healthcare data set on cancer. The quantitative and qualitative results (with
annotations and analysis from a physician) are reported in this use case which
is the main motivation for this work.
  Keywords: data mining; formal concept analysis; pattern structures;
projections; sequences; sequential data.
