When event logs are large, the time needed to analyze them using process mining techniques can become prohibitive. In this paper, using sampling, we aim to reduce the size of event logs to p-traces, while minimizing the Earth Movers’ Distance (EMD) from the unsampled original event log. We contribute by formalizing log sampling in a canonical form and show its link with the EMD, a metric increasingly used for process mining. Next, we propose three log-sampling algorithms that we evaluate using a collection of 18 event logs from industry. We show that our approach largely reduces the EMD compared to existing sampling strategies. Moreover, we highlight that sampled event logs with low EMDs tend to have better behavioural quality, highlighting the generality of our work.

We propose a more realistic approach to trip planning for tourist applications by adding category information to points of interest (POIs). This makes it easier for tourists to formulate their preferences by stating constraints on categories rather than individual POIs. However, solving this problem is not just a matter of extending existing algorithms. In our approach we exploit the fact that POIs are usually not evenly distributed but tend to appear in clusters. We develop a group of efficient algorithms based on clustering with guaranteed theoretical bounds. We also evaluate our algorithms experimentally, using real-world data sets, showing that in practice the results are better than the theoretical guarantees and very close to the optimal solution.

As modern software systems grow in size and complexity so do their configuration possibilities. Users are easy to be confused and overwhelmed by the amount of choices they need to make in order to fit their systems to their exact needs. We propose a method to construct adaptive configuration elicitation dialogs through utilizing crowd wisdom. A set of configuration preferences in the form of association rules is first mined from a crowd configuration data set. Possible configuration elicitation dialogs are then modeled through a Markov Decision Process (MDP). Association rules are used to inform the model about configuration decisions that can be automatically inferred from knowledge already elicited earlier in the dialog. This way, an MDP solver can search for elicitation strategies which maximize the expected amount of automated decisions, reducing thereby elicitation effort and increasing user confidence of the result. The method is applied to the privacy configuration of Facebook.

In a database, besides known dependencies among columns (e.g., foreign key and primary key constraints), there are many other correlations unknown to the database users. Extraction of such hidden correlations is known to be useful for various tasks in database optimization and data analytics. However, the task is challenging due to the lack of measures to quantify column correlations. Correlations may exist among columns of different data types and value domains, which makes techniques based on value matching inapplicable. Besides, a column may have multiple semantics, which does not allow disjoint partitioning of columns. Finally, from a computational perspective, one has to consider a huge search space that grows exponentially with the number of columns.

Relation extraction transforms the textual representation of a relationship into the relational model of a data warehouse. Early systems, such as SystemT by IBM or the open source system GATE solve this task with handcrafted rule sets that the system executes document-by-document. Thereby the user must execute a highly interactive and iterative process of reading a document, of expressing rules, of testing these rules on the next document and of refining rules. Until now, these systems do neither leverage the full potential of built-in declarative query languages nor the indexing and query optimization techniques of a modern RDBMS that would enable a user interactive rule refinement across documents and on the entire corpus. We propose the INDREX system that enables a user for the first time to describe corpus-wide extraction tasks in a declarative language and permits the user to run interactive rule refinement queries. For enabling this powerful functionality we extend a standard PostgreSQL with a set of white-box user-defined functions that enable corpus-wide transformations from sentences into relationships. We store the text corpus and rules in the same RDBMS that already holds domain specific structured data. As a result, (1) the user can leverage this data to further adapt rules to the target domain, (2) the user does not need an additional system for rule extraction and (3) the INDREX system can leverage the full power of built-in indexing and query optimization techniques of the underlaying RDBMS. In a preliminary study we report on the feasibility of this disruptive approach and show multiple queries in INDREX on the Reuters Corpus, Volume 1.

An attribute dictionary is a set of attributes together with a set of common values of each attribute. Such dictionaries are valuable in understanding unstructured or loosely structured textual descriptions of entity collections, such as product catalogs. Dictionaries provide the supervised data for learning product or entity descriptions. In this demonstration, we will present AutoDict, a system that analyzes input data records, and discovers high quality dictionaries using information theoretic techniques. To the best of our knowledge, AutoDict is the first end-to-end system for building attribute dictionaries. Our demonstration will showcase the different information analysis and extraction features within AutoDict, and highlight the process of generating high quality attribute dictionaries.

In this paper we focus on the problem of ranking news stories within their historical context by exploiting their content similarity. We observe that news stories evolve and thus have to be ranked in a time and query dependent manner. We do this in two steps. First, the mining step discovers metastories, which constitute meaningful groups of similar stories that occur at arbitrary points in time. Second, the ranking step uses well known measures of content similarity to construct implicit links among all metastories, and uses them to rank those metastories that overlap the time interval provided in a user query. We use real data from conventional and social media sources (weblogs) to study the impact of different meta-aggregation techniques and similarity measures in the final ranking. We evaluate the framework using both objective and subjective criteria, and discuss the selection of clustering method and similarity measure that lead to the best ranking results.

Business processes (BPs) are central to the operation of both public and private organizations. A business process is a set of coordinated tasks and activities to achieve a business objective or goal. Given the importance of BPs to overall efficiency and effectiveness, the competitiveness of organizations hinges on continuous BP improvement. In the nineties, the focus of BP improvement was on automation: workflow management systems (WfMSs) and other middleware technologies were used to reduce cost and improve efficiency by providing better system integration and automated enactment of operational business processes. Recently, the focus of business process has expanded to monitoring, analysis and understanding of business processes, and such techniques are incorporated in business process management systems (BPMSs).

The detection of duplicate tuples, corresponding to the same real-world entity, is an important task in data integration and cleaning. While many techniques exist to identify such tuples, the merging or elimination of duplicates can be a difficult task that relies on ad-hoc and often manual solutions. We propose a complementary approach that permits declarative query answering over duplicated data, where each duplicate is associated with a probability of being in the clean database. We rewrite queries over a database containing duplicates to return each answer with the probability that the answer is in the clean database. Our rewritten queries are sensitive to the semantics of duplication and help a user understand which query answers are most likely to be present in the clean database. The semantics that we adopt is independent of the way the probabilities are produced, but is able to effectively exploit them during query answering. In the absence of external knowledge that associates each database tuple with a probability, we offer a technique, based on tuple summaries, that automates this task. We experimentally study the performance of our rewritten queries. Our studies show that the rewriting does not introduce a significant overhead in query execution time. This work is done in the context of the ConQuer project at the University of Toronto, which focuses on the efficient management of inconsistent and dirty databases.

Large-scale legacy programs take long time to compile, thereby hampering productivity. This paper presents algorithms that reduce compilation time by analyzing syntactic dependencies in fine-grain program units, and by removing redundancies as well as false dependencies. These algorithms are combined with parallel compilation techniques (compiler farms, compiler caches), to further reduce build time. We demonstrate through experiments their effectiveness in achieving significant speedup for both fresh and incremental builds.

The majority of the algorithms in the software clustering literature utilize structural information to decompose large software systems. Approaches using other attributes, such as file names or ownership information, have also demonstrated merit. At the same time, existing algorithms commonly deem all attributes of the software artifacts being clustered as equally important, a rather simplistic assumption. Moreover, no method that can assess the usefulness of a particular attribute for clustering purposes has been presented in the literature. In this paper, we present an approach that applies information theoretic techniques in the context of software clustering. Our approach allows for weighting schemes that reflect the importance of various attributes to be applied. We introduce LIMBO, a scalable hierarchical clustering algorithm based on the minimization of information loss when clustering a software system. We also present a method that can assess the usefulness of any nonstructural attribute in a software clustering context. We applied LIMBO to three large software systems in a number of experiments. The results indicate that this approach produces clusterings that come close to decompositions prepared by system experts. Experimental results were also used to validate our usefulness assessment method. Finally, we experimented with well-established weighting schemes from information retrieval, Web search, and data clustering. We report results as to which weighting schemes show merit in the decomposition of software systems.

Data design has been characterized as a process of arriving at a design that maximizes the information content of each piece of data (or equivalently, one that minimizes redundancy). Information content (or redundancy) is measured with respect to a prescribed model for the data, a model that is often expressed as a set of constraints. In this work, we consider the problem of doing data redesign in an environment where the prescribed model is unknown or incomplete. Specifically, we consider the problem of finding structural clues in an instance of data, an instance which may contain errors, missing values, and duplicate records. We propose a set of information-theoretic tools for finding structural summaries that are useful in characterizing the information content of the data, and ultimately useful in data design. We provide algorithms for creating these summaries over large, categorical data sets. We study the use of these summaries in one specific physical design task, that of ranking functional dependencies based on their data redundancy. We show how our ranking can be used by a physical data-design tool to find good vertical decompositions of a relation (decompositions that improve the information content of the design). We present an evaluation of the approach on real data sets.