# What is an appropriate machine learning technique to analyse development of status over time? [closed]

I have a dataset as follows (not the actual data, but representative):

User   Age  Salary  Status_2000  Status_2001  Status_2002  Status_2003  ... Status_2019
John   30   10000   A            A            A            B            ...  A
Mary   25   20000   A            B            B            B            ...  C
Jacob  35   30000   E            F            F            F            ...  A
Jenny  28   22000   A            F            F            A            ...  F


I have over 50,000 rows and I want to perform an analyse the development patterns of the Status from 2000 to 2019. However, the Status are encoded with letters from A to J. I would like to ask whether there are any machine learning methods or clustering methods which could help in this analysis? I initially thought of K-Means but I'm not sure if that is appropriate even with Label Encoding.

In the same dataset, there are also the following columns:

User   Age  Salary  2000_%  2001_%  2002_%  2003_%  ... 2019_%
John   30   10000   0%      0%      20%     25%     ... 100%
Mary   25   20000   0%      10%     40%     60%     ... 80%
Jacob  35   30000   0%      80%     100%    80%     ... 80%
Jenny  28   22000   0%      0%      0%      20%     ... 60%


where the data represents % of the maximum amount from 2000 to 2019, and I want to perform an analysis on the development of the %. Are there any techniques suitable for such analysis?

• What are you even trying to do? – Anony-Mousse Sep 3 at 5:58
• @Anony-Mousse I am trying to see if there are any patterns (i.e. if there are many statuses that take the path A-->A-->B etc) in the data...but not sure what methods to use – InvadersMustDie Sep 3 at 7:43
• Well, that obviously calls for a very different approach than clustering, but rather frequent subsequence mining, doesn't it? But you really need to first clearly identify the problem that you need to solve before trying out random methods. If you don't know what you really want and need, nobody else is. Ans you'll get the usual "use k-means" answers that won't actually solve anything. – Anony-Mousse Sep 3 at 9:46
• @Anony-Mousse Ahhh yes, I do have an idea of the problem I want to solve, but I'm not sure what kind of methods are appropriate. Thanks for raising out subsequence mining! :) – InvadersMustDie Sep 4 at 2:21