Abstract
Event mining is a useful way to understand computer system behaviors. The focus of recent works on event mining has been shifted to event summarization from discovering frequent patterns. Event summarization seeks to provide a comprehensible explanation of the event sequence on certain aspects. Previous methods have several limitations such as ignoring temporal information, generating the same set of boundaries for all event patterns, and providing a summary which is difficult for human to understand. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called natural event summarization that summarizes an event sequence using inter-arrival histograms to capture the temporal relationship among events. Our framework uses the minimum description length principle to guide the process in order to balance between accuracy and brevity. Also, we use multi-resolution analysis for pruning the problem space. We demonstrate how the principles can be applied to generate summaries with periodic patterns and correlation patterns in the framework. Experimental results on synthetic and real data show our method is capable of producing usable event summary, robust to noises, and scalable. © 2011 ACM.