Expressions: Aggregations On The Fly - Pattern Match First Matched Pattern

The Pattern Match feature of ‘on the fly’ aggregations, has been extended and can return:

different values based upon the first matched pattern
the number of times a person has matched the first matched pattern

First Matched Pattern

The Pattern Match algorithm stops when it encounters its first matched pattern and returns the Pattern Name to confirm that a particular pattern has occurred. However, when examining long lists of transactions, it can be useful to make selections based on some aspect of the pattern being matched. For example, when did the pattern start and/or end? How long did that pattern last? How many transactions did it take to complete the pattern?

The available options are:

The transaction number on which the pattern started being matched
The value of the ordering variable for the first value in the pattern
The value of the item variable at the start of the pattern
The transaction number on which the pattern ended being matched
The value of the ordering variable for the last value in the pattern
The value of the item variable at the end of the pattern
The length of the pattern as a number of transactions
The difference between the start and end values of the ordering variable

To access and select an option:

Click on the Return the drop-down at the bottom of the Pattern Match aggregation window

The Data Type for the expression will automatically set and return the results according to the ordering variable selected:

Text

Pattern Name
Start Transaction Value
End Transaction Value

Numeric

Start Number
End Number
Pattern Length
Pattern Order Span
Number of Matches

Start Order Value & End Order Value – can be Date, DateTime, Numeric or ordinal Selector and is, therefore, dependent upon the data type of the ordering variable used.

The Data Grid below demonstrates how the Return the values can be used to identify the start and end points for a ?1 - ?2 - ?1 positional wildcard Pattern Match aggregation, already applied:

Currently, values are returned based on the first matched pattern. If you want to restrict this to recent patterns, you can use a transactional filter selection based on date.

Number of Matches

Going beyond the first matched pattern, in the Return the drop-down, there is the Number of Matches option which allows us to establish how many times a person has matched the first matched pattern.

For example:

A person with transactions of ABCAB, where the pattern match is AB, returns a value of 2

For patterns with repeating values, it is possible to determine if each matched pattern should allow overlaps or not. This is achieved using the check-box that appears when you select Number of Matches:

For example, a person with transactions AAAA, where the pattern match is AA, returns 3 with overlaps and 2 without

Each matched pattern will have a different start transaction. This is seen in the results returned from the following pattern definition:

Based on allowing overlaps, for the Destination variable, person URNs 119535 and 119755 both have 8 holiday bookings to the United States and return a count of 4 for the number of overlapping matches of 5 bookings to the same destination:

Based on the transactions for Person URNs 119569 and 119656, a count of just 1 is returned: