Database-assisted automata learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces DAALder, a database-assisted algorithm for learning deterministic finite automata from large log datasets, offering memory efficiency and comparable performance to traditional methods.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel automata learning algorithm that leverages database technology to handle large datasets efficiently, combining active and passive learning approaches.

Findings

Requires significantly less memory than traditional algorithms

Achieves similar performance on large datasets

Efficiently queries large trace datasets using database heuristics

Abstract

This paper presents DAALder (Database-Assisted Automata Learning, with Dutch suffix from leerder), a new algorithm for learning state machines, or automata, specifically deterministic finite-state automata (DFA). When learning state machines from log data originating from software systems, the large amount of log data can pose a challenge. Conventional state merging algorithms cannot efficiently deal with this, as they require a large amount of memory. To solve this, we utilized database technologies to efficiently query a big trace dataset and construct a state machine from it, as databases allow to save large amounts of data on disk while still being able to query it efficiently. Building on research in both active learning and passive learning, the proposed algorithm is a combination of the two. It can quickly find a characteristic set of traces from a database using heuristics from a state merging algorithm. Experiments show that our algorithm has similar performance to conventional state merging algorithms on large datasets, but requires far less memory.