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: 6099
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2021
Pagerank: 4.5708988e-05
Overall Rank: 8,154 | 43.33%
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
3,971	Apache IoTDB: A Time Series Database for IoT Applications	2023	SIGMOD	6.5733348e-05
8,142	Erebus: Explaining the Outputs of Data Streaming Queries	2023	VLDB	4.5724134e-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	0.00030155645
487	Why Not?	2009	SIGMOD	0.00022030123
545	Composite Events for Active Databases: Semantics, Contexts and Detection	1994	VLDB	0.00020411404
653	On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data	2008	VLDB	0.00018616975
772	Efficient Pattern Matching over Event Streams	2008	SIGMOD	0.00016790632
1,124	How to ConQueR Why-Not Questions	2010	SIGMOD	0.00013832959
1,141	Consistent Streaming Through Time: A Vision for Event Stream Processing	2007	CIDR	0.00013703749
1,214	Truth Finding on the Deep Web: Is the Problem Solved?	2013	VLDB	0.00013246179
2,029	On Complexity and Optimization of Expensive Queries in Complex Event Processing	2014	SIGMOD	9.7344839e-05
2,565	Explaining Missing Answers to SPJUA Queries	2010	VLDB	8.5307653e-05
2,642	Messing Up with BART: Error Generation for Evaluating Data-Cleaning Algorithms	2016	VLDB	8.3925184e-05
2,828	Plan-based Complex Event Detection across Distributed Sources	2008	VLDB	8.0545975e-05
3,100	Answering Why-not Questions on Reverse Top-k Queries	2015	VLDB	7.5625111e-05
3,142	Time Series Data Cleaning: From Anomaly Detection to Anomaly Repairing	2017	VLDB	7.4905759e-05
6,069	IL-Miner: Instance-Level Discovery of Complex Event Patterns	2017	VLDB	5.2240157e-05
6,148	Recognizing Patterns in Streams with Imprecise Timestamps	2010	VLDB	5.1838459e-05
6,700	Approximate Summaries for Why and Why-not Provenance	2020	VLDB	4.9534371e-05

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