Report 83 27 Discovering Patterns in Sequences of Objects . S Stanford Thomas G. S. May 1983

A more general kind of sequence-prediction problem--the non-deterministic prediction problem--is defined, and a general methodology for its solution presented. The methodology, called SPARC, employs multiple description models to guide the search for plausible sequence-generating rules. Three different models are presented along with algorithms for instantiating them to discover rules. The instantiation process requires that the initial input sequence be substantially transformed to make explicit important features of the sequence. Four different data transformation operators arc described. The architecture of a system called SPARC/E is presented, which implements most of the methodology for discovering sequence-generating rules in the card game Elcusis. Examples of the execution of SPARC/E are presented.