Xiaochen Zhu

Efficient recovery of missing events

For various entering and transmission issues raised by human or system, missing events often occur in event data, which record execution logs of business processes. Without recovering the missing events, applications such as provenance analysis or complex event processing built upon event data are not reliable. Following the minimum change discipline in improving data quality, it is also rational to find a recovery that minimally differs from the original data. Existing recovery approaches fall short of efficiency owing to enumerating and searching over all of the possible sequences of events. In this paper, we study the efficient techniques for recovering missing events. According to our theoretical results, the recovery problem appears to be NP-hard. Nevertheless, advanced indexing, pruning techniques are developed to further improve the recovery efficiency. The experimental results demonstrate that our minimum recovery approach achieves high accuracy, and significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art technique for up to five orders of magnitudes improvement in time performance.

Cleaning structured event logs: A graph repair approach

Event data are often dirty owing to various recording conventions or simply system errors. These errors may cause many serious damages to real applications, such as inaccurate provenance answers, poor profiling results or concealing interesting patterns from event data. Cleaning dirty event data is strongly demanded. While existing event data cleaning techniques view event logs as sequences, structural information do exist among events. We argue that such structural information enhances not only the accuracy of repairing inconsistent events but also the computation efficiency. It is notable that both the structure and the names (labeling) of events could be inconsistent. In real applications, while unsound structure is not repaired automatically (which needs manual effort from business actors to handle the structure error), it is highly desirable to repair the inconsistent event names introduced by recording mistakes. In this paper, we propose a graph repair approach for 1) detecting unsound structure, and 2) repairing inconsistent event name.

Matching heterogeneous events with patterns

A large amount of heterogeneous event data are increasingly generated, e.g., in online systems for Web services or operational systems in enterprises. Owing to the difference between event data and traditional relational data, the matching of heterogeneous events is highly non-trivial. While event names are often opaque (e.g., merely with obscure IDs), the existing structure-based matching techniques for relational data also fail to perform owing to the poor discriminative power of dependency relationships between events. We note that interesting patterns exist in the occurrence of events, which may serve as discriminative features in event matching. In this paper, we formalize the problem of matching events with patterns. A generic pattern based matching framework is proposed, which is compatible with the existing structure based techniques. To improve the matching efficiency, we devise several bounds of matching scores for pruning. Since the exploration of patterns is costly and incrementally, our proposed techniques support matching in a pay-as-you-go style, i.e., incrementally update the matching results with the increase of available patterns. Finally, extensive experiments on both real and synthetic data demonstrate the effectiveness of our pattern based matching compared with approaches adapted from existing techniques, and the efficiency improved by the bounding/pruning methods.

Matching heterogeneous event data

Identifying events from different sources is essential to various business process applications such as provenance querying or process mining. Distinct features of heterogeneous events, including opaque names and dislocated traces, prevent existing data integration techniques from performing well. To address these issues, in this paper, (1) we propose an event similarity function by iteratively evaluating similar neighbors. (2) In addition to event nodes, we further employ the similarity of edges (indicating relationships among events) in event matching. We prove NP-hardness of finding the optimal event matching w.r.t. node and edge similarities, and propose an efficient heuristic for event matching. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed event matching approach can achieve significantly higher accuracy than state-of-the-art matching methods. In particular, by considering the event edge similarity, our heuristic matching algorithm further improves the matching accuracy without introducing much overhead.

Efficient Recovery of Missing Events

For various entering and transmission issues raised by human or system, missing events often occur in event data, which record execution logs of business processes. Without recovering the missing events, applications such as provenance analysis or complex event processing built upon event data are not reliable. Following the minimum change discipline in improving data quality, it is also rational to find a recovery that minimally differs from the original data. Existing recovery approaches fall short of efficiency owing to enumerating and searching over all of the possible sequences of events. In this paper, we study the efficient techniques for recovering missing events. According to our theoretical results, the recovery problem appears to be NP-hard. Nevertheless, advanced indexing, pruning techniques are developed to further improve the recovery efficiency. The experimental results demonstrate that our minimum recovery approach achieves high accuracy, and significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art technique for up to five orders of magnitudes improvement in time performance.

Verification of workflow nets with transition conditions

Workflow management is concerned with automated support for business processes. Workflow management systems are driven by process models specifying the tasks that need to be executed, the order in which they can be executed, which resources are authorised to perform which tasks, and data that is required for, and produced by, these tasks. As workflow instances may run over a sustained period of time, it is important that workflow specifications be checked before they are deployed. Workflow verification is usually concerned with control-flow dependencies only; however, transition conditions based on data may further restrict possible choices between tasks. In this paper we extend workflow nets where transitions have concrete conditions associated with them, called WTC-nets. We then demonstrate that we can determine which execution paths of a WTC-net that are possible according to the control-flow dependencies, are actually possible when considering the conditions based on data. Thus, we are able to more accurately determine at design time whether a workflow net with transition conditions is sound.

Matching Heterogeneous Events with Patterns

A large amount of heterogeneous event data are increasingly generated, e.g., in online systems for Web services or operational systems in enterprises. Owing to the difference between event data and traditional relational data, the matching of heterogeneous events is highly non-trivial. While event names are often opaque (e.g., merely with obscure IDs), the existing structure-based matching techniques for relational data also fail to perform owing to the poor discriminative power of dependency relationships between events. We note that interesting patterns exist in the occurrence of events, which may serve as discriminative features in event matching. In this paper, we formalize the problem of matching events with patterns. A generic pattern based matching framework is proposed, which is compatible with the existing structure based techniques. To improve the matching efficiency, we devise several bounds of matching scores for pruning. Recognizing the np-hardness of the optimal event matching problem with patterns, we propose efficient heuristic. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our pattern based matching compared with approaches adapted from existing techniques, and the efficiency improved by the bounding, pruning and heuristic methods.