Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) is the non-trivial process of identifying valid, novel, useful and ultimately understandable patterns in data. The core step of the KDD process is the application of Data Mining (DM) algorithms to efficiently find interesting patterns in large databases. This thesis concerns itself with three inter-related themes: Generalised interaction and rule mining; the incorporation of statistics into novel data mining approaches; and probabilistic frequent pattern mining in uncertain databases.

An interaction describes an effect that variables have -- or appear to have -- on each other. Interaction mining is the process of mining structures on variables describing their interaction patterns -- usually represented as sets, graphs or rules. Interactions may be complex, represent both positive and negative relationships, and the presence of interactions can influence another interaction or variable in interesting ways. Finding interactions is useful in domains ranging from social network analysis, marketing, the sciences, e-commerce, to statistics and finance. Many data mining tasks may be considered as mining interactions, such as clustering; frequent itemset mining; association rule mining; classification rules; graph mining; flock mining; etc. Interaction mining problems can have very different semantics, pattern definitions, interestingness measures and data types. Solving a wide range of interaction mining problems at the abstract level, and doing so efficiently -- ideally more efficiently than with specialised approaches, is a challenging problem.

This thesis introduces and solves the Generalised Interaction Mining (GIM) and Generalised Rule Mining (GRM) problems. GIM and GRM use an efficient and intuitive computational model based purely on vector valued functions. The semantics of the interactions, their interestingness measures and the type of data considered are flexible components of vectorised frameworks. By separating the semantics of a problem from the algorithm used to mine it, the frameworks allow both to vary independently of each other. This makes it easier to develop new methods by focusing purely on a problem's semantics and removing the burden of designing an efficient algorithm. By encoding interactions as vectors in the space (or a sub-space) of samples, they provide an intuitive geometric interpretation that inspires novel methods. By operating in time linear in the number of interesting interactions that need to be examined, the GIM and GRM algorithms are optimal. The use of GRM or GIM provides efficient solutions to a range of problems in this thesis, including graph mining, counting based methods, itemset mining, clique mining, a clustering problem, complex pattern mining, negative pattern mining, solving an optimisation problem, spatial data mining, probabilistic itemset mining, probabilistic association rule mining, feature selection and generation, classification and multiplication rule mining.

Data mining is a hypothesis generating endeavour, examining large databases for patterns suggesting novel and useful knowledge to the user. Since the database is a sample, the patterns found should describe hypotheses about the underlying process generating the data. In searching for these patterns, a DM algorithm makes additional hypothesis when it prunes the search space. Natural questions to ask then, are: "Does the algorithm find patterns that are statistically significant?" and "Did the algorithm make significant decisions during its search?". Such questions address the quality of patterns found though data mining and the confidence that a user can have in utilising them. Finally, statistics has a range of useful tools and measures that are applicable in data mining. In this context, this thesis incorporates statistical techniques -- in particular, non-parametric significance tests and correlation -- directly into novel data mining approaches. This idea is appl

UML state machines are a widely used language for modeling software behavior. They are considered to be simple and intuitively comprehensible, and are hence one of the most popular languages for modeling reactive components. However, this seeming ease to use vanishes rapidly as soon as the complexity of the system to model increases. In fact, even state machines modeling ``almost trivial'' behavior may get rather hard to understand and error-prone. In particular, synchronization of parallel regions and history-based features are often difficult to model in UML state machines. We therefore propose High-Level Aspect (HiLA), a new, aspect-oriented extension of UML state machines, which can improve the modularity, thus the comprehensibility and reusability of UML state machines considerably. Aspects are used to define additional or alternative system behaviors at certain ``interesting'' points of time in the execution of the state machine, and achieve a high degree of separation of concerns. The distinguishing feature of HiLA w.r.t. other approaches of aspect-oriented state machines is that HiLA aspects are defined on a high, i.e. semantic level as opposed to a low, i.e. syntactic level. This semantic approach makes \HiLA aspects often simpler and better comprehensible than aspects of syntactic approaches. The contributions of this thesis include 1) the abstract and the concrete syntax of HiLA, 2) the weaving algorithms showing how the (additional or alternative) behaviors, separately modeled in aspects, are composed with the base state machine, giving the complete behavior of the system, 3) a formal semantics for HiLA aspects to define how the aspects are activated and (after the execution) left. We also discuss what conflicts between HiLA aspects are possible and how to detect them. The practical applicability of HiLA is shown in a case study of a crisis management system.

Performanzprobleme treten in der Praxis von IT-Anwendungen häufig auf, trotz steigender Hardwareleistung und verschiedenster Ansätze zur Entwicklung performanter Software im Softwarelebenszyklus. Modellbasierte Performanzanalysen ermöglichen auf Basis von Entwurfsartefakten eine Prävention von Performanzproblemen. Bei bestehenden oder teilweise implementierten IT-Anwendungen wird versucht, durch Hardwareskalierung oder Optimierung des Codes Performanzprobleme zu beheben. Beide Ansätze haben Nachteile: modellbasierte Ansätze werden durch die benötigte hohe Expertise nicht generell genutzt, die nachträgliche Optimierung ist ein unsystematischer und unkoordinierter Prozess. Diese Dissertation schlägt einen neuen Ansatz zur Performanzanalyse für eine nachfolgende Optimierung vor. Mittels eines Experiments werden Performanzwechselwirkungen in der IT-Anwendung identifiziert. Basis des Experiments, das Analyseinstrumentarium, ist eine zielgerichtete, zeitliche Variation von Start-, Endzeitpunkt oder Laufzeitdauer von Abläufen der IT-Anwendung. Diese Herangehensweise ist automatisierbar und kann strukturiert und ohne hohen Lernaufwand im Softwareentwicklungsprozess angewandt werden. Mittels der Turingmaschine wird bewiesen, dass durch die zeitliche Variation des Analyseinstrumentariums die Korrektheit von sequentiellen Berechnung beibehalten wird. Dies wird auf nebenläufige Systeme mittels der parallelen Registermaschine erweitert und diskutiert. Mit diesem praxisnahen Maschinenmodell wird dargelegt, dass die entdeckten Wirkzusammenhänge des Analyseinstrumentariums Optimierungskandidaten identifizieren. Eine spezielle Experimentierumgebung, in der die Abläufe eines Systems, bestehend aus Software und Hardware, programmierbar variiert werden können, wird mittels einer Virtualisierungslösung realisiert. Techniken zur Nutzung des Analyseinstrumentariums durch eine Instrumentierung werden angegeben. Eine Methode zur Ermittlung von Mindestanforderungen von IT-Anwendungen an die Hardware wird präsentiert und mittels der Experimentierumgebung anhand von zwei Szenarios und dem Android Betriebssystem exemplifiziert. Verschiedene Verfahren, um aus den Beobachtungen des Experiments die Optimierungskandidaten des Systems zu eruieren, werden vorgestellt, klassifiziert und evaluiert. Die Identifikation von Optimierungskandidaten und -potenzial wird an Illustrationsszenarios und mehreren großen IT-Anwendungen mittels dieser Methoden praktisch demonstriert. Als konsequente Erweiterung wird auf Basis des Analyseinstrumentariums eine Testmethode zum Validieren eines Systems gegenüber nicht deterministisch reproduzierbaren Fehlern, die auf Grund mangelnder Synchronisationsmechanismen (z.B. Races) oder zeitlicher Abläufe entstehen (z.B. Heisenbugs, alterungsbedingte Fehler), angegeben.

Analyzing, understanding and working with complex systems and large datasets has become a familiar challenge in the information era. The explosion of data worldwide affects nearly every part of society, particularly the science, engineering, health, and financial domains. Looking, for instance at the automotive industry, engineers are confronted with the enormously increased complexity of vehicle electronics. Over the years, a large number of advanced functions, such as ACC (adaptive cruise control), rear seat entertainment systems or automatic start/stop engines, has been integrated into the vehicle. Thereby, the functions have been more and more distributed over the vehicle, leading to the introduction of several communication networks. Overlooking all relevant data facets, understanding dependencies, analyzing the flow of messages and tracking down problems in these networks has become a major challenge for automotive engineers.

Promising approaches to overcome information overload and to provide insight into complex data are Information Visualization (InfoVis) and Visual Analytics (VA). Over the last decades, these research communities spent much effort on developing new methods to help users obtain insight into complex data. However, few of these solutions have yet reached end users, and moving research into practice remains one of the great challenges in visual data analysis. This situation is particularly true for large company settings, where very little is known about additional challenges, obstacles and requirements in InfoVis/VA development and evaluation. Users have to be better integrated into our research processes in terms of adequate requirements analysis, understanding practices and challenges, developing well-directed, user-centered technologies and evaluating their value within a realistic context.

This dissertation explores a novel InfoVis/VA application area, namely in-car communication networks, and demonstrates how information visualization methods and techniques can help engineers to work with and better understand these networks. Based on a three-year internship with a large automotive company and the close cooperation with domain experts, I grounded a profound understanding of specific challenges, requirements and obstacles for InfoVis/VA application in this area and learned that “designing with not for the people” is highly important for successful solutions. The three main contributions of this dissertation are: (1) An empirical analysis of current working practices of automotive engineers and the derivation of specific design requirements for InfoVis/VA tools; (2) the successful application and evaluation of nine prototypes, including the deployment of five systems; and (3) based on the three-year experience, a set of recommendations for developing and evaluating InfoVis systems in large company settings.

I present ethnographic studies with more than 150 automotive engineers. These studies helped us to understand currently used tools, the underlying data, tasks as well as user groups and to categorize the field into application sub-domains. Based on these findings, we propose implications and recommendations for designing tools to support current practices of automotive network engineers with InfoVis/VA technologies. I also present nine InfoVis design studies that we built and evaluated with automotive domain experts and use them to systematically explore the design space of applying InfoVis to in-car communication networks. Each prototype was developed in a user-centered, participatory process, respectively with a focus on a specific sub-domain of target users with specific data and tasks. Experimental results from studies with real users are presented, that show that the visualization prototypes can improve the engineers’ work in terms of working efficiency, better understanding and novel insights. Based on lessons learned from repeatedly designing and evaluating our tools together with do

Diffusion processes are a promising instrument to realistically model the time-continuous evolution of natural phenomena in life sciences. However, approximation of a given system is often carried out heuristically, leading to diffusions that do not correctly reflect the true dynamics of the original process. Moreover, statistical inference for diffusions proves to be challenging in practice as the likelihood function is typically intractable.

This thesis contributes to stochastic modelling and statistical estimation of real problems in life sciences by means of diffusion processes. In particular, it creates a framework from existing and novel techniques for the correct approximation of pure Markov jump processes by diffusions. Concerning statistical inference, the thesis reviews existing practices and analyses and further develops a well-known Bayesian approach which introduces auxiliary observations by means of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques. This procedure originally suffers from convergence problems which stem from a deterministic link between the model parameters and the quadratic variation of a continuously observed diffusion path. This thesis formulates a neat modification of the above approach for general multi-dimensional diffusions and provides the mathematical and empirical proof that the so-constructed MCMC scheme converges.

The potential of the newly developed modelling and estimation methods is demonstrated in two real-data application studies: the spatial spread of human influenza in Germany and the in vivo binding behaviour of proteins in cell nuclei.

Gängige Theorien der mathematischen Finanzwirtschaft wie zum Beispiel

der Mean-Variance-Ansatz zur Portfolio-Selektion oder Modelle zur Bewertung

von Wertpapieren basieren alle auf der Annahme, dass Renditen im

Zeitablauf unabhngig und identisch verteilt sind und einer Normalverteilung

folgen. Empirische Untersuchungen liefern jedoch signifikante Hinweise dahingehend,

dass diese Annahme f¨ur wichtige Anlageklassen unzutreffend ist.

Stattdessen sindWertpapierrenditen zeitabh¨angige Volatilit¨aten, Heavy Tails

(schwere Verteilungsr¨ander), Tail Dependence (Extremwertabh¨angigkeit) sowie

Schiefe gekennzeichnet. Diese Eigenschaften haben Auswirkungen sowohl

auf die theoretische als auch praktischeModellierung in der Finanzwirtschaft.

Nach der Pr¨asentation des theoretischen Hintergrundes spricht die Arbeit die

Modellierungsprobleme an, die sich aus diesen h¨aufig beobachteten Ph¨anomenen

ergeben. Speziell werden Fragen bez¨uglich der Modellierung von Marktund

Kreditrisiken volatiler M¨arkte behandelt als auch Probleme bei der

Portfolio-Optimierung unter Verwendung alternativer Risikomae und Zielfunktionen.

Fragen der praktischen Implementierung wird dabei besondere

Aufmerksamkeit gewidmet.

Steffen Jost researched a novel static program analysis that automatically infers formally guaranteed upper bounds on the use of compositional quantitative resources. The technique is based on the manual amortised complexity analysis. Inference is achieved through a type system

annotated with linear constraints. Any solution to the collected constraints yields the coefficients of a formula, that expresses an upper bound on the resource consumption of a program through the sizes of its various inputs.

The main result is the formal soundness proof of the proposed analysis for a functional language. The strictly evaluated language features higher-order types, full mutual recursion, nested data types, suspension of evaluation, and can deal with aliased data. The presentation focuses on heap space bounds. Extensions allowing the inference of bounds on stack space usage and worst-case execution time

are demonstrated for several realistic program examples. These bounds were inferred by the created generic implementation of the technique. The implementation is highly efficient, and solves even large examples within seconds.