---
title: "Deep Dive: Positive and Negative Times"
url: "https://docs.noreja.com/en/article/deep-dive-positive-and-negative-times"
language: "en"
last_updated: "2026-02-23T07:27:10.573Z"
---

# Deep Dive: Positive and Negative Times

Understanding the direction of time between process activities is essential for identifying anomalies, validating event sequences, and ensuring data integrity. The Positive and Negative Time Handling feature in Noreja enables advanced analysis by distinguishing whether transitions follow a natural forward timeline or reflect backward time jumps. This powerful filtering capability helps uncover data quality issues, detect reordered events, and isolate unusual process behavior—providing deeper insight into temporal dynamics within complex workflows.

In Noreja, we offer advanced filtering options that allow you to analyze process behavior based on the **direction of time** between activities – specifically whether the time between two activities is **positive** or **negative**.

This distinction helps you better understand unusual transitions, such as those where events happen out of chronological order or with suspiciously fast/slow timing.

## What does "Time Handling" mean?

By default, our process graphs show all transitions between activities, regardless of whether the time between them is positive or negative. However, with time filtering enabled, you can focus specifically on transitions that follow a **forward timeline** (positive) or detect potential data/modeling issues that appear as **backward time jumps** (negative).

## Positive Time Handling

If you **enable Positive Time Handling**, only transitions between activities are counted if their **duration is greater than or equal to zero**. This means that the second activity happened **after** the first activity, as expected.

![Positive Time Handling](https://cdn-assets.productfruits.com/9fb55962-4db0-406c-906c-2023534274ba)

**Example**  
In the transition from `Mahnstufe 1 einleiten` to `Mahnstufe 2 einleiten`, only those instances are included where the second activity occurred after the first.

Result:

-   `3` transitions from `Mahnstufe 1 einleiten` to `Mahnstufe 2 einleiten`
-   `1` transition from `Mahnstufe 1 einleiten` to `Zahlung erhalten`

### Negative Time Handling

If you **enable Negative Time Handling**, the process graph shows only transitions where the **duration is less than zero**, meaning that the second activity happened **before** the first.

This mode is especially useful to:

-   Detect data quality issues (e.g. swapped timestamps)
-   Identify edge cases or event reordering

![Negative Time Handling](https://cdn-assets.productfruits.com/9a6a90c2-cc04-4166-b1b7-ed1b5379a241)

**Example**  
In the same case example, two `Mahnstufe 1 einleiten` activities show negative-time transitions to `Mahnstufe 2 einleiten`.  
No transitions to `Zahlung erhalten` are counted in this mode.

Result:

-   `2` transitions from `Mahnstufe 1 einleiten` to `Mahnstufe 2 einleiten`
-   `0` transitions from `Mahnstufe 1 einleiten` to `Zahlung erhalten`

## Why don’t the quantities add up?

You might wonder:  
**Why is the sum of positive and negative transitions not equal to the total number of transitions without any time filtering?**

This happens due to what we call a **Clique situation**.  
In some cases, one case instance might have **multiple transitions** to different successors, some with positive and others with negative durations. Since an activity can be counted in both directions, the same instance may appear in both positive and negative views – but only once in the unfiltered view.

**In short:**

-   The **unfiltered** view shows all transitions once.
-   The **positive/negative** filters may **double-count** some instances when looking at them separately.

## Tip

You can toggle between **positive** and **negative** time filters in the *Path Time Filter* section on the right-hand panel within the **Analyzer**.  
Use this to investigate unusual behavior, validate event orderings, or isolate time-based anomalies.