Mining Past-Time Temporal Rules

Abstract

Specification mining is a process of extracting specifications, often from program execution traces. These specifications can in turn be used to aid program understanding, monitoring and verification. There are a number of dynamic-analysis-based specification mining tools in the literature, however none so far extract past time temporal expressions in the form of rules stating: “whenever a series of events occur, previously another series of events happened before”. Rules of this format are commonly found in practice and useful for various purposes. Most rule-based specification mining tools only mine future-time temporal expression. Many past-time temporal rules like “whenever a resource is used, it was allocated before” are asymmetric as the other direction does not holds. Hence, there is a need to mine past-time temporal rules. In this chapter, the authors describe an approach to mine significant rules of the above format occurring above a certain statistical thresholds from program execution traces. The approach start from a set of traces, each being a sequence of events (i.e., method invocations) and resulting in a set of significant rules obeying minimum thresholds of support and confidence. A rule compaction mechanism is employed to reduce the number of reported rules significantly. Experiments on traces of JBoss Application Server and Jeti instant messaging application shows the utility of our approach in inferring interesting past-time temporal rules.