1. A computer-implemented method for deriving a provenance of one or more of a plurality of output data elements generated from a given output port of a processing component of a data stream processing system, comprising the steps of: creating at least one dependency function that relates the one or more output data elements to a set of one or more input ports of the processing component and a corresponding plurality of input data elements, wherein the dependency function comprises an encoding of at least one of one or more temporal filters and one or more sequence filters relating to the plurality of input data elements; storing the at least one dependency function; storing a history of stream-level bindings of one or more input streams to one or more input ports of the processing component and one or more output streams from one or more output ports of the processing component, and storing the plurality of input data elements belonging to the one or more input streams and the plurality of output data elements belonging to the one or more output streams; and determining a set of one or more input data elements from the plurality of input data elements that relate to the one or more output data elements in accordance with the at least one dependency function and the history of stream-level bindings.