Exploiting the Analogy Between Traces and Signal Processing

Abstract

The main challenge of dynamic analysis is the huge volume of data, making it difficult to extract high level views. Most techniques developed so far adopt a finegrained approach to address this issue. In this paper we introduce a novel approach representing entire traces as signals in time. Drawing this analogy between dynamic analysis and signal processing, we are able to access a rich toolkit of well-established and ready-to-use analysis techniques. As an application of this analogy, we show how to fit a visualization of the complete feature space of a system on one page only: our approach visualizes feature traces as time plots, summarizes the trace signals and uses dynamic time warping to group them by similar features. We apply the approach on a case study, and discuss both common and unique patterns as observed on the visualization