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Complex Event Processing (CEP- not to be confused by Circular Probability Error) is defined processing many events happening across all the layers of an organization, identifying the most meaningful events within the event cloud, analyzing their impact, and taking subsequent action in real time.

Software supporting CEP are-

Oracle http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/soa/service-oriented-architecture-066455.html

Oracle CEP is a Java application server for the development and deployment of high-performance event driven applications. It can detect patterns in the flow of events and message payloads, often based on filtering, correlation, and aggregation across event sources, and includes industry leading temporal and ordering capabilities. It supports ultra-high throughput (1 million/sec++) and microsecond latency.

Tibco is also trying to get into this market (it claims to have a 40 % market share in the public CEP market though probably they have not measured the DoE and DoD as worthy of market share yet

- see webcast by TIBCO ‘s head here http://www.tibco.com/products/business-optimization/complex-event-processing/default.jsp

and product info here-http://www.tibco.com/products/business-optimization/complex-event-processing/businessevents/default.jsp

TIBCO is the undisputed leader in complex event processing (CEP) software with over 40 percent market share, according to a recent IDC Study.

A good explanation of how social media itself can be used as an analogy for CEP is given in this SAS Global Paper

http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings10/040-2010.pdf

You can see a report on Predictive Analytics and Data Mining  in q1 2010 also from SAS’s website  at -http://www.sas.com/news/analysts/forresterwave-predictive-analytics-dm-104388-0210.pdf

A very good explanation on architecture involved is given by SAS CTO Keith Collins here on SAS’s Knowledge Exchange site,

http://www.sas.com/knowledge-exchange/risk/four-ways-divide-conquer.html

What it is: Methods 1 through 3 look at historical data and traditional architectures with information stored in the warehouse. In this environment, it often takes months of data cleansing and preparation to get the data ready to analyze. Now, what if you want to make a decision or determine the effect of an action in real time, as a sale is made, for instance, or at a specific step in the manufacturing process. With streaming data architectures, you can look at data in the present and make immediate decisions. The larger flood of data coming from smart phones, online transactions and smart-grid houses will continue to increase the amount of data that you might want to analyze but not keep. Real-time streaming, complex event processing (CEP) and analytics will all come together here to let you decide on the fly which data is worth keeping and which data to analyze in real time and then discard.

When you use it: Radio-frequency identification (RFID) offers a good user case for this type of architecture. RFID tags provide a lot of information, but unless the state of the item changes, you don’t need to keep warehousing the data about that object every day. You only keep data when it moves through the door and out of the warehouse.

The same concept applies to a customer who does the same thing over and over. You don’t need to keep storing data for analysis on a regular pattern, but if they change that pattern, you might want to start paying attention.

Figure 4: Traditional architecture vs. streaming architecture

In academia  here is something called SASE Language

• A rich declarative event language
• Formal semantics of the event language
• Theorectical underpinnings of CEP
• An efficient automata-based implementation

http://sase.cs.umass.edu/

and

http://avid.cs.umass.edu/sase/index.php?page=navleft_1col

Financial Services

The query below retrieves the total trading volume of Google stocks in the 4 hour period after some bad news occurred.

PATTERN SEQ(News a, Stock+ b[ ])WHERE   [symbol]    AND	a.type = 'bad'    AND	b[i].symbol = 'GOOG' WITHIN  4 hoursHAVING  b[b.LEN].volume < 80%*b[1].volumeRETURN  sum(b[ ].volume)

The next query reports a one-hour period in which the price of a stock increased from 10 to 20 and its trading volume stayed relatively stable.

PATTERN	SEQ(Stock+ a[])WHERE 	 [symbol]   AND	  a[1].price = 10   AND	  a[i].price > a[i-1].price   AND	  a[a.LEN].price = 20            WITHIN  1 hourHAVING	avg(a[].volume) ≥ a[1].volumeRETURN	a[1].symbol, a[].price

The third query detects a more complex trend: in an hour, the volume of a stock started high, but after a period of price increasing or staying relatively stable, the volume plummeted.

PATTERN SEQ(Stock+ a[], Stock b)WHERE 	 [symbol]   AND	  a[1].volume > 1000   AND	  a[i].price > avg(a[…i-1].price))   AND	  b.volume < 80% * a[a.LEN].volume           WITHIN  1 hourRETURN	a[1].symbol, a[].(price,volume), b.(price,volume)

(note from Ajay-

I was not really happy about the depth of resources on CEP available online- there seem to be missing bits and pieces in both open source, academic and corporate information- one reason for this is the obvious military dual use of this technology- like feeds from Satellite, Audio Scans, etc)

Related Articles

• Quant Capital Deploys Aleri CEP Technology for Algorithmic Trading (eon.businesswire.com)
• Sybase Positions Itself as a Clear Market Leader in CEP and Strengthens Its Real-Time Analytics Platform with Acquisition of Aleri Assets (eon.businesswire.com)
• Event Processing in Action (i-programmer.info)