Learning from the past: automated rule generation for complex event processing

Abstract

Complex Event Processing (CEP) systems aim at processing large flows of events to discover situations of interest. In CEP, the processing takes place according to user-defined rules, which specify the (causal) relations between the observed events and the phenomena to be detected. We claim that the complexity of writing such rules is a limiting factor for the diffusion of CEP. In this paper, we tackle this problem by introducing iCEP, a novel framework that learns, from historical traces, the hidden causality between the received events and the situations to detect, and uses them to automatically generate CEP rules. The paper introduces three main contributions. It provides a precise definition for the problem of automated CEP rules generation. It dicusses a general approach to this research challenge that builds on three fundamental pillars: decomposition into subproblems, modularity of solutions, and ad-hoc learning algorithms. It provides a concrete implementation of this approach, the iCEP framework, and evaluates its precision in a broad range of situations, using both synthetic benchmarks and real traces from a traffic monitoring scenario.