Big time series are increasingly available from an ever wider range of IoT-enabled sensors deployed in various environments. Significant insights can be gained by mining temporal patterns from these time series. Temporal pattern mining (TPM) extends traditional pattern mining by adding event time intervals into extracted patterns, making them more expressive at the expense of increased time and space complexities. Besides frequent temporal patterns (FTPs), which occur frequently in the entire dataset, another useful type of temporal patterns are so-calledrare temporal patterns (RTPs), which appear rarely but with high confidence. Mining rare temporal patterns yields additional challenges. For FTP mining, the temporal information and complex relations between events already create an exponential search space. For RTP mining, the support measure is set very low, leading to a further combinatorial explosion and potentially producing too many uninteresting patterns. Thus, there is a need for a better approach to mine frequent and rare temporal patterns. This paper presents ourGeneralized Temporal Pattern Mining from Time Series (GTPMfTS)approach that can mine both types of patterns, with the following specific contributions: (1) The end-to-end GTPMfTS process taking time series as input and producing frequent/rare temporal patterns as output. (2) The efficientGeneralized Temporal Pattern Mining (GTPM)algorithm mines frequent and rare temporal patterns using efficient data structures for fast retrieval of events and patterns during the mining process, and employs effective pruning techniques for significantly faster mining. (3) An approximate version of GTPM that uses mutual information, a measure of data correlation, to prune unpromising time series from the search space. (4) An extensive experimental evaluation of GTPM for rare temporal pattern mining (RTPM) and frequent temporal pattern mining (FTPM), showing that RTPM and FTPM significantly outperform the baselines on runtime and memory consumption, and can scale to big datasets. The approximate RTPM is up to one order of magnitude, and the approximate FTPM is up to two orders of magnitude, faster than the baselines, while retaining high accuracy.

The recent emergence of Large Language Model (LLM)-based tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini has sparked excitement across the software development industry, and offered promises to transform the software development process. Despite the enthusiasm, it remains uncertain whether these tools are already good enough at coding to replace the role of software developers. Currently, no studies have provided insights into the performance of LLMs, such as understanding which characteristics of a programming task might affect an LLM's performance, or predicting how an LLM will handle new programming challenges. In this work, we address these challenges by first creating a data collection framework to gather 3,323 programming tasks from Kattis, a widely-used programming challenge platform. We then use OpenAI's ChatGPT to solve these programming tasks. The solutions obtained from ChatGPT are submitted back to Kattis to evaluate their correctness and effectiveness. Next, we use the collected data, including both problem and solution information, to analyze the task characteristics that significantly influence ChatGPT's performance. Building on the analysis, we develop predictive models that can forecast the efficacy of ChatGPT on new programming problems. Our analysis indicates that factors such as the difficulty level of a programming challenge, or the readability complexity of a problem description can significantly affect the efficacy of ChatGPT. Finally, the experimental results show that our predictive model can correctly predict ChatGPT performance with an accuracy of up to 90% for easy problems, and up to 79% for difficult problems.

Causal inference from observational data has been widely studied to infer causal relations between causes and effects. Due to the popularity of event-based data, causal inference from event datasets has attracted increasing interest. However, inferring causalities from observational event sequences is challenging because of the heterogeneous and irregular nature of event-based data. Existing work on causal inference for temporal events disregards the event durations, and is thus unable to capture their impact on the causal relations. In the present paper, we overcome this limitation by proposing a new modeling approach for temporal events that captures and utilizes event durations. Based on this new temporal model, we propose a set of novel Duration-based Event Causality (DEC) scores, including the Duration-based Necessity and Sufficiency Trade-off score, and the Duration-based Conditional Intensity Rates scores that take into consideration event durations when inferring causal associations between temporal events. We conduct an extensive experimental evaluation using both synthetic datasets and real-world event datasets in the environmental domains to evaluate our proposed scores, and compare them against the closest baseline. The experimental results show that our proposed scores outperform the baseline with a large margin using the popular evaluation metric Hits@K.

As IoT-enabled sensors become more pervasive, very large time series data are increasingly generated and made available for advanced data analytics. By mining temporal patterns from the available data, valuable insights can be extracted to support decision making. A useful type of patterns found in many real-world applications exhibits periodic occurrences, and is thus called seasonal temporal patterns (STP). Compared to regular patterns, mining seasonal temporal patterns is more challenging since traditional measures such as support and confidence do not capture the seasonality characteristics. Further, the anti-monotonicity property does not hold for STPs, and thus, resulting in an exponential search space. We propose a first solution for seasonal temporal pattern mining (STPM) from time series that can mine STP at different data granularities. We design efficient data structures and use two pruning techniques for the STPM algorithm that downsize the search space and accelerate the mining process. Further, based on the mutual information measure, we propose an approximate version of STPM that only mine seasonal patterns on the promising time series. Finally, extensive experiments with real-world and synthetic datasets show that STPM outperforms the baseline in terms of runtime and memory usage, and can scale to large datasets. The approximate STPM is up to an order of magnitude faster and less memory-consuming than the baseline, while maintaining high accuracy.

The widespread deployment of IoT systems in the real world today has enabled the generation and collection of an enormous amount of sensor times series. One of the important mining techniques to extract patterns from time series is temporal pattern mining (TPM). Unlike the sequential pattern mining, TPM adds an additional temporal dimension, i.e., time intervals, into extracted patterns, making them more informative. However, adding the extra temporal dimension into patterns results in an additional exponential factor to the growth of the search space, and thus, significantly increases the mining complexity. Current TPM approaches work sequentially, therefore, cannot scale to large datasets. In this paper, we propose Distributed Hierarchical Pattern Graph TPM (DHPG-TPM), the first distributed solution that supports large-scale TPM using the leading distributed platform Apache Spark. Moreover, DHPG-TPM employs efficient data structures, distributed bitmap and distributed Hierarchical Pattern Graph that are carefully designed to work efficiently in a distributed environment to enable fast computations of support and confidence. To address the exponential search space of TPM, we design effective distributed pruning techniques based on the Apriori principle and the transitivity property of temporal relations to reduce the search space while minimizing the communication overhead between the cluster nodes. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets, showing that DHPG-TPM outperforms the sequential baselines and scales to very large datasets.

Very large time series are increasingly available from an ever wider range of IoT-enabled sensors deployed in different environments. Significant insights can be gained by mining temporal patterns from these time series. Unlike traditional pattern mining, temporal pattern mining (TPM) adds event time intervals into extracted patterns, making them more expressive at the expense of increased time and space complexities. Existing TPM methods either cannot scale to large datasets, or work only on pre-processed temporal events rather than on time series. This paper presents our Frequent Temporal Pattern Mining from Time Series (FTPMfTS) approach providing: (1) The end-to-end FTPMfTS process taking time series as input and producing frequent temporal patterns as output. (2) The efficient Hierarchical Temporal Pattern Graph Mining (HTPGM) algorithm that uses efficient data structures for fast support and confidence computation, and employs effective pruning techniques for significantly faster mining. (3) An approximate version of HTPGM that uses mutual information, a measure of data correlation, to prune unpromising time series from the search space. (4) An extensive experimental evaluation showing that HTPGM outperforms the baselines in runtime and memory consumption, and can scale to big datasets. The approximate HTPGM is up to two orders of magnitude faster and less memory consuming than the baselines, while retaining high accuracy.

Very large time series are increasingly available from an ever wider range of IoT-enabled sensors deployed in different environments. Significant insights and values can be obtained from these time series through performing cross-domain analyses, one of which is analyzing time delay temporal correlations across different datasets. Most existing works in this area are either limited in the type of detected relations, e.g., linear relations alone, only working with a fixed temporal scale, or not considering time delay between time series. This paper presents our Time delaY COrrelation Search (TYCOS) approach which provides a powerful and robust solution with the following features: (1) TYCOS is based on the concept of mutual information (MI) from information theory, giving it a strong theoretical foundation to detect all types of relations including non-linear ones, (2) TYCOS is able to discover time delay correlations at multiple temporal scales, (3) TYCOS works in an efficient, bottom-up fashion, pruning non-interesting time intervals from the search by employing a novel MI-based noise theory, and (4) TYCOS is designed to efficiently minimize computational redundancy. A comprehensive experimental evaluation using synthetic and real-world datasets from the energy and smart city domains shows that TYCOS is able to find significant time delay correlations across different time intervals among big time series. The performance evaluation shows that TYCOS can scale to large datasets, and achieve an average speedup of 2 to 3 orders of magnitude compared to the baselines by using the proposed optimizations.

Recent developments in computing and IoT technology have enabled the daily generation of enormous amounts of time series data. These time series have to be analyzed to create value. A fundamental type of analysis is to find temporal correlations between given sets of time series. To provide a robust method for solving this problem, several properties are desirable. First, the method should have a strong theoretical foundation. Second, since temporal correlations can occur at different temporal scales, e.g., sub-second versus weekly, it is important that the method is capable of discovering multitemporal scale correlations. Finally, the method should be efficient and scalable. This paper presents an approach to search for synchronous correlations in big time series that displays all three properties: the proposed method (i) utilizes the metric of mutual information from information theory, providing a strong theoretical foundation, (ii) is able to discover correlations at multiple temporal scales, and (iii) works in an efficient, bottom-up fashion, making it scalable to large datasets. Our experiments verify that the proposed approach can identify various types of correlation relations across multiple temporal scales, while achieving a performance of an order of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art techniques.