SHARP: Shared State Reduction for Efficient Matching of Sequential Patterns

TL;DR

SHARP introduces a novel state reduction technique with pattern sharing to improve the efficiency of sequential pattern matching in data processing systems, achieving high recall under strict latency constraints.

Contribution

The paper presents SHARP, a library that employs state sharing and a new abstraction called pattern-sharing degree to optimize pattern matching efficiency and enable best-effort processing under latency bounds.

Findings

Achieves 97% recall in CEP applications

Achieves 96% recall in OLAP applications

Achieves 73% recall in RAG applications

Abstract

The detection of sequential patterns in data is a basic functionality of modern data processing systems for complex event processing (CEP), OLAP, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). In practice, pattern matching is challenging, since common applications rely on a large set of patterns that shall be evaluated with tight latency bounds. At the same time, matching needs to maintain state, i.e., intermediate results, that grows exponentially in the input size. Hence, systems turn to best-effort processing, striving for maximal recall under a latency bound. Existing techniques, however, consider each pattern in isolation, neglecting the optimization potential induced by state sharing in pattern matching. In this paper, we present SHARP, a library that employs state reduction to achieve efficient best-effort pattern matching. To this end, SHARP incorporates state sharing between patterns through a new abstraction, coined pattern-sharing degree (PSD). At runtime, this abstraction facilitates the categorization and indexing of partial pattern matches. Based thereon, once a latency bound is exceeded, SHARP realizes best-effort processing by selecting a subset of partial matches for further processing in constant time. In experiments with real-world data, SHARP achieves a recall of 97%, 96% and 73% for pattern matching in CEP, OLAP, and RAG applications, under a bound of 50% of the average processing latency.