Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
7-2024
Abstract
Temporal event data are commonly encountered in software applications across a wide range of domains, from IT telemetry and system logs to business process automation. Temporal event data in software applications carry information in various forms: both structured and unstructured, and with both regular and irregular occurrence frequency, making the representation of temporal event data challenging. Further chal-lenges come from the diversity in terms of the scale and volume of events that need to be summarized by the representation. We propose a general and unified approach to handle temporal event data for the purpose of learning a predictive transformer model. Our approach subsumes many existing techniques and is relevant across diverse application domains. Further, our approach can be used with many transformer architectures from the original transformer to recent, more complex architectures. Through a simple extension of the transformer training procedure, we enable the model to provide explanations of its predicted events. Empirically, we show that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on software-related tasks coming from a wide variety of application domains.
Keywords
temporal event, time series, transformer, deep learning, IT Ops
Discipline
Software Engineering
Research Areas
Intelligent Systems and Optimization
Areas of Excellence
Digital transformation
Publication
Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Software Services Engineering (SSE), Shenzhen, China, July 7-13
First Page
130
Last Page
140
ISBN
9798350368512
Identifier
10.1109/SSE62657.2024.00030
Publisher
IEEE Computer Society
City or Country
Los Alamitos, CA
Citation
LIM, Shiau Hong and WYNTER, Laura.
Transformer models with explainability for IT telemetry and business events. (2024). Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Software Services Engineering (SSE), Shenzhen, China, July 7-13. 130-140.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/10339
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1109/SSE62657.2024.00030