The main purpose of data mining and analytics is to find novel, potentially useful patterns that can be utilized in real-world applications to derive beneficial knowledge. For identifying and evaluating the usefulness of different kinds of patterns, many techniques/constraints have been proposed, such as support, confidence, sequence order, and utility parameters (e.g., weight, price, profit, quantity, etc.). In recent years, there has been an increasing demand for utility-oriented pattern mining (UPM). UPM is a vital task, with numerous high-impact applications, including cross-marketing, e-commerce, finance, medical, and biomedical applications. This survey aims to provide a general, comprehensive, and structured overview of the state-of-the-art methods of UPM. First, we introduce an in-depth understanding of UPM, including concepts, examples, and comparisons with related concepts. A taxonomy of the most common and state-of-the-art approaches for mining different kinds of high-utility patterns is presented, including Apriori-based, tree-based, projection-based, vertical-/horizontal-data-format-based, and other hybrid approaches. A comprehensive review of advanced topics of existing high-utility pattern mining techniques is offered, with a discussion of their pros and cons. Finally, we present several well-known open-source software packages for UPM. We conclude our survey with a discussion on open and practical challenges in this field.
