@phdthesis{Vitagliano2024,
  author    = {Vitagliano, Gerardo},
  title     = {Modeling the structure of tabular files for data preparation},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-62435},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-624351},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {ii, 114},
  year      = {2024},
  abstract  = {To manage tabular data files and leverage their content in a given downstream task, practitioners often design and execute complex transformation pipelines to prepare them. The complexity of such pipelines stems from different factors, including the nature of the preparation tasks, often exploratory or ad-hoc to specific datasets; the large repertory of tools, algorithms, and frameworks that practitioners need to master; and the volume, variety, and velocity of the files to be prepared. Metadata plays a fundamental role in reducing this complexity: characterizing a file assists end users in the design of data preprocessing pipelines, and furthermore paves the way for suggestion, automation, and optimization of data preparation tasks. Previous research in the areas of data profiling, data integration, and data cleaning, has focused on extracting and characterizing metadata regarding the content of tabular data files, i.e., about the records and attributes of tables. Content metadata are useful for the latter stages of a preprocessing pipeline, e.g., error correction, duplicate detection, or value normalization, but they require a properly formed tabular input. Therefore, these metadata are not relevant for the early stages of a preparation pipeline, i.e., to correctly parse tables out of files. In this dissertation, we turn our focus to what we call the structure of a tabular data file, i.e., the set of characters within a file that do not represent data values but are required to parse and understand the content of the file. We provide three different approaches to represent file structure, an explicit representation based on context-free grammars; an implicit representation based on file-wise similarity; and a learned representation based on machine learning. In our first contribution, we use the grammar-based representation to characterize a set of over 3000 real-world csv files and identify multiple structural issues that let files deviate from the csv standard, e.g., by having inconsistent delimiters or containing multiple tables. We leverage our learnings about real-world files and propose Pollock, a benchmark to test how well systems parse csv files that have a non-standard structure, without any previous preparation. We report on our experiments on using Pollock to evaluate the performance of 16 real-world data management systems. Following, we characterize the structure of files implicitly, by defining a measure of structural similarity for file pairs. We design a novel algorithm to compute this measure, which is based on a graph representation of the files' content. We leverage this algorithm and propose Mondrian, a graphical system to assist users in identifying layout templates in a dataset, classes of files that have the same structure, and therefore can be prepared by applying the same preparation pipeline. Finally, we introduce MaGRiTTE, a novel architecture that uses self-supervised learning to automatically learn structural representations of files in the form of vectorial embeddings at three different levels: cell level, row level, and file level. We experiment with the application of structural embeddings for several tasks, namely dialect detection, row classification, and data preparation efforts estimation. Our experimental results show that structural metadata, either identified explicitly on parsing grammars, derived implicitly as file-wise similarity, or learned with the help of machine learning architectures, is fundamental to automate several tasks, to scale up preparation to large quantities of files, and to provide repeatable preparation pipelines.},
  language  = {en}
}
@inproceedings{RojahnGronau2024,
  author    = {Rojahn, Marcel and Gronau, Norbert},
  title     = {Openness indicators for the evaluation of digital platforms between the launch and maturity phase},
  series = {Proceedings of the 57th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 57th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences},
  editor    = {Bui, Tung X.},
  publisher = {Department of IT Management Shidler College of Business University of Hawaii},
  address   = {Honolulu, HI},
  isbn      = {978-0-99813-317-1},
  pages     = {4516 -- 4525},
  year      = {2024},
  abstract  = {In recent years, the evaluation of digital platforms has become an important focus in the field of information systems science. The identification of influential indicators that drive changes in digital platforms, specifically those related to openness, is still an unresolved issue. This paper addresses the challenge of identifying measurable indicators and characterizing the transition from launch to maturity in digital platforms. It proposes a systematic analytical approach to identify relevant openness indicators for evaluation purposes. The main contributions of this study are the following (1) the development of a comprehensive procedure for analyzing indicators, (2) the categorization of indicators as evaluation metrics within a multidimensional grid-box model, (3) the selection and evaluation of relevant indicators, (4) the identification and assessment of digital platform architectures during the launch-to-maturity transition, and (5) the evaluation of the applicability of the conceptualization and design process for digital platform evaluation.},
  language  = {en}
}
@phdthesis{Halfpap2024,
  author    = {Halfpap, Stefan},
  title     = {Integer linear programming-based heuristics for partially replicated database clusters and selecting indexes},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-63361},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-633615},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {iii, 185},
  year      = {2024},
  abstract  = {Column-oriented database systems can efficiently process transactional and analytical queries on a single node. However, increasing or peak analytical loads can quickly saturate single-node database systems. Then, a common scale-out option is using a database cluster with a single primary node for transaction processing and read-only replicas. Using (the naive) full replication, queries are distributed among nodes independently of the accessed data. This approach is relatively expensive because all nodes must store all data and apply all data modifications caused by inserts, deletes, or updates. In contrast to full replication, partial replication is a more cost-efficient implementation: Instead of duplicating all data to all replica nodes, partial replicas store only a subset of the data while being able to process a large workload share. Besides lower storage costs, partial replicas enable (i) better scaling because replicas must potentially synchronize only subsets of the data modifications and thus have more capacity for read-only queries and (ii) better elasticity because replicas have to load less data and can be set up faster. However, splitting the overall workload evenly among the replica nodes while optimizing the data allocation is a challenging assignment problem. The calculation of optimized data allocations in a partially replicated database cluster can be modeled using integer linear programming (ILP). ILP is a common approach for solving assignment problems, also in the context of database systems. Because ILP is not scalable, existing approaches (also for calculating partial allocations) often fall back to simple (e.g., greedy) heuristics for larger problem instances. Simple heuristics may work well but can lose optimization potential. In this thesis, we present optimal and ILP-based heuristic programming models for calculating data fragment allocations for partially replicated database clusters. Using ILP, we are flexible to extend our models to (i) consider data modifications and reallocations and (ii) increase the robustness of allocations to compensate for node failures and workload uncertainty. We evaluate our approaches for TPC-H, TPC-DS, and a real-world accounting workload and compare the results to state-of-the-art allocation approaches. Our evaluations show significant improvements for varied allocation's properties: Compared to existing approaches, we can, for example, (i) almost halve the amount of allocated data, (ii) improve the throughput in case of node failures and workload uncertainty while using even less memory, (iii) halve the costs of data modifications, and (iv) reallocate less than 90\% of data when adding a node to the cluster. Importantly, we can calculate the corresponding ILP-based heuristic solutions within a few seconds. Finally, we demonstrate that the ideas of our ILP-based heuristics are also applicable to the index selection problem.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{RojahnWeberGronau2023,
  author    = {Rojahn, Marcel and Weber, Edzard and Gronau, Norbert},
  title     = {Towards a standardization in scheduling models},
  series = {International journal of industrial and systems engineering},
  volume    = {17},
  journal   = {International journal of industrial and systems engineering},
  number    = {6},
  publisher = {Inderscience Enterprises},
  address   = {Gen{\`e}ve},
  issn      = {1748-5037},
  pages     = {401 -- 408},
  year      = {2023},
  abstract  = {Terminology is a critical instrument for each researcher. Different terminologies for the same research object may arise in different research communities. By this inconsistency, many synergistic effects get lost. Theories and models will be more understandable and reusable if a common terminology is applied. This paper examines the terminological (in)consistence for the research field of job-shop scheduling by a literature review. There is an enormous variety in the choice of terms and mathematical notation for the same concept. The comparability, reusability and combinability of scheduling methods is unnecessarily hampered by the arbitrary use of homonyms and synonyms. The acceptance in the community of used variables and notation forms is shown by means of a compliance quotient. This is proven by the evaluation of 240 scientific publications on planning methods.},
  language  = {en}
}
@misc{RitterbuschTeichmann2023,
  author    = {Ritterbusch, Georg David and Teichmann, Malte Rolf},
  title     = {Defining the metaverse},
  series = {Zweitver{\"o}ffentlichungen der Universit{\"a}t Potsdam : Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Reihe},
  journal   = {Zweitver{\"o}ffentlichungen der Universit{\"a}t Potsdam : Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Reihe},
  number    = {159},
  issn      = {1867-5808},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-58879},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-588799},
  pages     = {12368 -- 12377},
  year      = {2023},
  abstract  = {The term Metaverse is emerging as a result of the late push by multinational technology conglomerates and a recent surge of interest in Web 3.0, Blockchain, NFT, and Cryptocurrencies. From a scientific point of view, there is no definite consensus on what the Metaverse will be like. This paper collects, analyzes, and synthesizes scientific definitions and the accompanying major characteristics of the Metaverse using the methodology of a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). Two revised definitions for the Metaverse are presented, both condensing the key attributes, where the first one is rather simplistic holistic describing "a three-dimensional online environment in which users represented by avatars interact with each other in virtual spaces decoupled from the real physical world". In contrast, the second definition is specified in a more detailed manner in the paper and further discussed. These comprehensive definitions offer specialized and general scholars an application within and beyond the scientific context of the system science, information system science, computer science, and business informatics, by also introducing open research challenges. Furthermore, an outlook on the social, economic, and technical implications is given, and the preconditions that are necessary for a successful implementation are discussed.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{RitterbuschTeichmann2023,
  author    = {Ritterbusch, Georg David and Teichmann, Malte Rolf},
  title     = {Defining the metaverse},
  series = {IEEE Access},
  volume    = {11},
  journal   = {IEEE Access},
  publisher = {Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers},
  address   = {New York, NY},
  issn      = {2169-3536},
  doi       = {10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3241809},
  pages     = {12368 -- 12377},
  year      = {2023},
  abstract  = {The term Metaverse is emerging as a result of the late push by multinational technology conglomerates and a recent surge of interest in Web 3.0, Blockchain, NFT, and Cryptocurrencies. From a scientific point of view, there is no definite consensus on what the Metaverse will be like. This paper collects, analyzes, and synthesizes scientific definitions and the accompanying major characteristics of the Metaverse using the methodology of a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). Two revised definitions for the Metaverse are presented, both condensing the key attributes, where the first one is rather simplistic holistic describing "a three-dimensional online environment in which users represented by avatars interact with each other in virtual spaces decoupled from the real physical world". In contrast, the second definition is specified in a more detailed manner in the paper and further discussed. These comprehensive definitions offer specialized and general scholars an application within and beyond the scientific context of the system science, information system science, computer science, and business informatics, by also introducing open research challenges. Furthermore, an outlook on the social, economic, and technical implications is given, and the preconditions that are necessary for a successful implementation are discussed.},
  language  = {en}
}
@phdthesis{Bano2023,
  author    = {Bano, Dorina},
  title     = {Discovering data models from event logs},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-58542},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-585427},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {xvii, 137},
  year      = {2023},
  abstract  = {In the last two decades, process mining has developed from a niche discipline to a significant research area with considerable impact on academia and industry. Process mining enables organisations to identify the running business processes from historical execution data. The first requirement of any process mining technique is an event log, an artifact that represents concrete business process executions in the form of sequence of events. These logs can be extracted from the organization's information systems and are used by process experts to retrieve deep insights from the organization's running processes. Considering the events pertaining to such logs, the process models can be automatically discovered and enhanced or annotated with performance-related information. Besides behavioral information, event logs contain domain specific data, albeit implicitly. However, such data are usually overlooked and, thus, not utilized to their full potential. Within the process mining area, we address in this thesis the research gap of discovering, from event logs, the contextual information that cannot be captured by applying existing process mining techniques. Within this research gap, we identify four key problems and tackle them by looking at an event log from different angles. First, we address the problem of deriving an event log in the absence of a proper database access and domain knowledge. The second problem is related to the under-utilization of the implicit domain knowledge present in an event log that can increase the understandability of the discovered process model. Next, there is a lack of a holistic representation of the historical data manipulation at the process model level of abstraction. Last but not least, each process model presumes to be independent of other process models when discovered from an event log, thus, ignoring possible data dependencies between processes within an organization. For each of the problems mentioned above, this thesis proposes a dedicated method. The first method provides a solution to extract an event log only from the transactions performed on the database that are stored in the form of redo logs. The second method deals with discovering the underlying data model that is implicitly embedded in the event log, thus, complementing the discovered process model with important domain knowledge information. The third method captures, on the process model level, how the data affects the running process instances. Lastly, the fourth method is about the discovery of the relations between business processes (i.e., how they exchange data) from a set of event logs and explicitly representing such complex interdependencies in a business process architecture. All the methods introduced in this thesis are implemented as a prototype and their feasibility is proven by being applied on real-life event logs.},
  language  = {en}
}
@incollection{RojahnAmbrosBiruetal.2023,
  author    = {Rojahn, Marcel and Ambros, Maximilian and Biru, Tibebu and Krallmann, Hermann and Gronau, Norbert and Grum, Marcus},
  title     = {Adequate basis for the data-driven and machine-learning-based identification},
  series = {Artificial intelligence and soft computing},
  booktitle = {Artificial intelligence and soft computing},
  editor    = {Rutkowski, Leszek and Scherer, Rafał and Korytkowski, Marcin and Pedrycz, Witold and Tadeusiewicz, Ryszard and Zurada, Jacek M.},
  publisher = {Springer},
  address   = {Cham},
  isbn      = {978-3-031-42504-2},
  doi       = {10.1007/978-3-031-42505-9_48},
  pages     = {570 -- 588},
  year      = {2023},
  abstract  = {Process mining (PM) has established itself in recent years as a main method for visualizing and analyzing processes. However, the identification of knowledge has not been addressed adequately because PM aims solely at data-driven discovering, monitoring, and improving real-world processes from event logs available in various information systems. The following paper, therefore, outlines a novel systematic analysis view on tools for data-driven and machine learning (ML)-based identification of knowledge-intensive target processes. To support the effectiveness of the identification process, the main contributions of this study are (1) to design a procedure for a systematic review and analysis for the selection of relevant dimensions, (2) to identify different categories of dimensions as evaluation metrics to select source systems, algorithms, and tools for PM and ML as well as include them in a multi-dimensional grid box model, (3) to select and assess the most relevant dimensions of the model, (4) to identify and assess source systems, algorithms, and tools in order to find evidence for the selected dimensions, and (5) to assess the relevance and applicability of the conceptualization and design procedure for tool selection in data-driven and ML-based process mining research.},
  language  = {en}
}
@phdthesis{Sakizloglou2023,
  author    = {Sakizloglou, Lucas},
  title     = {Evaluating temporal queries over history-aware architectural runtime models},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-60439},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-604396},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {v, 168},
  year      = {2023},
  abstract  = {In model-driven engineering, the adaptation of large software systems with dynamic structure is enabled by architectural runtime models. Such a model represents an abstract state of the system as a graph of interacting components. Every relevant change in the system is mirrored in the model and triggers an evaluation of model queries, which search the model for structural patterns that should be adapted. This thesis focuses on a type of runtime models where the expressiveness of the model and model queries is extended to capture past changes and their timing. These history-aware models and temporal queries enable more informed decision-making during adaptation, as they support the formulation of requirements on the evolution of the pattern that should be adapted. However, evaluating temporal queries during adaptation poses significant challenges. First, it implies the capability to specify and evaluate requirements on the structure, as well as the ordering and timing in which structural changes occur. Then, query answers have to reflect that the history-aware model represents the architecture of a system whose execution may be ongoing, and thus answers may depend on future changes. Finally, query evaluation needs to be adequately fast and memory-efficient despite the increasing size of the history---especially for models that are altered by numerous, rapid changes. The thesis presents a query language and a querying approach for the specification and evaluation of temporal queries. These contributions aim to cope with the challenges of evaluating temporal queries at runtime, a prerequisite for history-aware architectural monitoring and adaptation which has not been systematically treated by prior model-based solutions. The distinguishing features of our contributions are: the specification of queries based on a temporal logic which encodes structural patterns as graphs; the provision of formally precise query answers which account for timing constraints and ongoing executions; the incremental evaluation which avoids the re-computation of query answers after each change; and the option to discard history that is no longer relevant to queries. The query evaluation searches the model for occurrences of a pattern whose evolution satisfies a temporal logic formula. Therefore, besides model-driven engineering, another related research community is runtime verification. The approach differs from prior logic-based runtime verification solutions by supporting the representation and querying of structure via graphs and graph queries, respectively, which is more efficient for queries with complex patterns. We present a prototypical implementation of the approach and measure its speed and memory consumption in monitoring and adaptation scenarios from two application domains, with executions of an increasing size. We assess scalability by a comparison to the state-of-the-art from both related research communities. The implementation yields promising results, which pave the way for sophisticated history-aware self-adaptation solutions and indicate that the approach constitutes a highly effective technique for runtime monitoring on an architectural level.},
  language  = {en}
}
@phdthesis{Lindinger2023,
  author    = {Lindinger, Jakob},
  title     = {Variational inference for composite Gaussian process models},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-60444},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-604441},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {xi, 122},
  year      = {2023},
  abstract  = {Most machine learning methods provide only point estimates when being queried to predict on new data. This is problematic when the data is corrupted by noise, e.g. from imperfect measurements, or when the queried data point is very different to the data that the machine learning model has been trained with. Probabilistic modelling in machine learning naturally equips predictions with corresponding uncertainty estimates which allows a practitioner to incorporate information about measurement noise into the modelling process and to know when not to trust the predictions. A well-understood, flexible probabilistic framework is provided by Gaussian processes that are ideal as building blocks of probabilistic models. They lend themself naturally to the problem of regression, i.e., being given a set of inputs and corresponding observations and then predicting likely observations for new unseen inputs, and can also be adapted to many more machine learning tasks. However, exactly inferring the optimal parameters of such a Gaussian process model (in a computationally tractable manner) is only possible for regression tasks in small data regimes. Otherwise, approximate inference methods are needed, the most prominent of which is variational inference. In this dissertation we study models that are composed of Gaussian processes embedded in other models in order to make those more flexible and/or probabilistic. The first example are deep Gaussian processes which can be thought of as a small network of Gaussian processes and which can be employed for flexible regression. The second model class that we study are Gaussian process state-space models. These can be used for time-series modelling, i.e., the task of being given a stream of data ordered by time and then predicting future observations. For both model classes the state-of-the-art approaches offer a trade-off between expressive models and computational properties (e.g. speed or convergence properties) and mostly employ variational inference. Our goal is to improve inference in both models by first getting a deep understanding of the existing methods and then, based on this, to design better inference methods. We achieve this by either exploring the existing trade-offs or by providing general improvements applicable to multiple methods. We first provide an extensive background, introducing Gaussian processes and their sparse (approximate and efficient) variants. We continue with a description of the models under consideration in this thesis, deep Gaussian processes and Gaussian process state-space models, including detailed derivations and a theoretical comparison of existing methods. Then we start analysing deep Gaussian processes more closely: Trading off the properties (good optimisation versus expressivity) of state-of-the-art methods in this field, we propose a new variational inference based approach. We then demonstrate experimentally that our new algorithm leads to better calibrated uncertainty estimates than existing methods. Next, we turn our attention to Gaussian process state-space models, where we closely analyse the theoretical properties of existing methods.The understanding gained in this process leads us to propose a new inference scheme for general Gaussian process state-space models that incorporates effects on multiple time scales. This method is more efficient than previous approaches for long timeseries and outperforms its comparison partners on data sets in which effects on multiple time scales (fast and slowly varying dynamics) are present. Finally, we propose a new inference approach for Gaussian process state-space models that trades off the properties of state-of-the-art methods in this field. By combining variational inference with another approximate inference method, the Laplace approximation, we design an efficient algorithm that outperforms its comparison partners since it achieves better calibrated uncertainties.},
  language  = {en}
}