Why Not Match: On Explanations of Event Pattern Queries

Summary: Explanations for non-answers in event-pattern queries; two classes: pattern-consistency (no match) and timestamp-modification. NP-complete for both; notation isolates tractable/approximate cases; experiments on real/synthetic data show practicality. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 6098
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2021
Pagerank: 4.5752863e-05
Overall Rank: 8,149 | 43.31%
DOI: 10.1145/3448016.3452818

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
3,967	Apache IoTDB: A Time Series Database for IoT Applications	2023	SIGMOD	6.5796647e-05
8,140	Erebus: Explaining the Outputs of Data Streaming Queries	2023	VLDB	4.5768015e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 17 of 17 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
259	High-Performance Complex Event Processing over Streams	2006	SIGMOD	0.00030174924
487	Why Not?	2009	SIGMOD	0.00022050218
546	Composite Events for Active Databases: Semantics, Contexts and Detection	1994	VLDB	0.00020428141
652	On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data	2008	VLDB	0.00018634477
776	Efficient Pattern Matching over Event Streams	2008	SIGMOD	0.00016799754
1,125	How to ConQueR Why-Not Questions	2010	SIGMOD	0.00013845652
1,141	Consistent Streaming Through Time: A Vision for Event Stream Processing	2007	CIDR	0.00013717279
1,211	Truth Finding on the Deep Web: Is the Problem Solved?	2013	VLDB	0.00013257101
2,031	On Complexity and Optimization of Expensive Queries in Complex Event Processing	2014	SIGMOD	9.7377256e-05
2,562	Explaining Missing Answers to SPJUA Queries	2010	VLDB	8.5386194e-05
2,638	Messing Up with BART: Error Generation for Evaluating Data-Cleaning Algorithms	2016	VLDB	8.399764e-05
2,821	Plan-based Complex Event Detection across Distributed Sources	2008	VLDB	8.0619099e-05
3,095	Answering Why-not Questions on Reverse Top-k Queries	2015	VLDB	7.5692859e-05
3,133	Time Series Data Cleaning: From Anomaly Detection to Anomaly Repairing	2017	VLDB	7.4978041e-05
6,067	IL-Miner: Instance-Level Discovery of Complex Event Patterns	2017	VLDB	5.2290408e-05
6,144	Recognizing Patterns in Streams with Imprecise Timestamps	2010	VLDB	5.1889367e-05
6,696	Approximate Summaries for Why and Why-not Provenance	2020	VLDB	4.9581958e-05

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