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Mining Quantified Temporal Rules: Formalism, Algorithms, and Evaluation
16th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, 2009, WCRE '09 : 13-16 October, Lille, France: Proceedings
  • David LO, Singapore Management University
  • Ganesan Ramalingam, Microsoft Research, India
  • Venkatesh-Prasad Ranganath, Microsoft Research, India
  • Kapil Vaswani, Microsoft Research, India
Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
submittedVersion
Publication Date
10-2009
Abstract

Libraries usually impose constraints on how clients should use them. Often these constraints are not well-documented. In this paper, we address the problem of recovering such constraints automatically, a problem referred to as specification mining. Given some client programs that use a given library, we identify constraints on the library usage that are (almost) satisfied by the given set of clients.The class of rules we target for mining combines simple binary temporal operators with state predicates (involving equality constraints) and quantification. This is a simple yet expressive subclass of temporal properties that allows us to capture many common API usage rules. We focus on recovering rules from execution traces and apply classical data mining concepts to be robust against bugs (API usage rule violations) in clients. We present new algorithms for mining rules from execution traces. We show how a propositional rule mining algorithm can be generalized to treat quantification and state predicates in a unified way. Our approach enables the miner to be complete — mine all rules within the targeted class that are satisfied by the given traces — while avoiding an exponential blowup.We have implemented these algorithms and used them to mine API usage rules for several Windows APIs. Our experiments show the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach.

ISBN
9780769538679
Identifier
10.1109/WCRE.2009.42
Publisher
IEEE
City or Country
Piscataway, NJ
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1109/WCRE.2009.42
Citation Information
David LO, Ganesan Ramalingam, Venkatesh-Prasad Ranganath and Kapil Vaswani. "Mining Quantified Temporal Rules: Formalism, Algorithms, and Evaluation" 16th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, 2009, WCRE '09 : 13-16 October, Lille, France: Proceedings (2009) p. 62 - 71
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/david_lo/18/