Enhancing Process Discovery by Optimizing Imprecise Sub-Processes

Process discovery aims at building process models using information retrieved from logs. Process characteristics play a significant role in the selection of a suitable process modeling language for describing process discovery results. Business processes characterized by high variability, in which participants have a lot of autonomy and flexibility in executing the process, are difficult to be described with procedural process modeling languages,since they explicitly represent in a model every possible path. Declarative languages, like Declare, alleviate this issue by defining a set of constraints between activities that must not be violated during the process execution instead of describing what to do step by step. Recently, several process discovery techniques have been proposed for extracting a set of Declare constraints from a log. However, no one of these techniques allows the user to exploit the time perspective often available in a log to discover “time-aware” Declare constraints. Timed Declare has already previously been introduced to monitor metric temporal constraints at runtime. In this paper, we use this semantics for discovering a set of Timed Declare constraints from an event log. We have implemented the proposed approach as a plug-in of the process mining tool ProM. We have validated the approach by using our plug-in to mine two real-life event logs.

Automated process discovery techniques allow us to generate a process model from an event log. The quality of automatically discovered process models can be assessed with respect to several criteria, including fitness, which captures the degree to which the process model is able to recognize the traces in the event log, and precision, which captures the extent to which the behavior allowed by the process model is observed in the event log. Many fitness and precision measures have been proposed in the literature. However, recent studies have shown that none of the existing measures fulfil a set of intuitive properties. In addition, existing fitness and precision measures suffer from scalability issues when applied to models discovered from real-life event logs. This article presents a family of fitness and precision measures based on the idea of comparing the k-th order Markovian abstractions of a process model and of an event log. We show that our family of measures fulfils the aforementioned properties for suitable values of k. An empirical evaluation shows that our proposed measures yield intuitive results on a synthetic dataset of model-log pairs, while outperforming existing measures in terms of execution times in real-life context.

Process mining techniques aim to analyze and improve conformance and performance of processes using event data. Process discovery is the most prominent process-mining task: A process model is derived based on an event log. The process model should be able to capture causalities, choices, concurrency, and loops. Process discovery is very challenging because of trade-offs between fitness, simplicity, precision, and generalization. Note that event logs typically only hold example behavior and cannot be assumed to be complete (to avoid overfitting). Dozens of process discovery techniques have been proposed. These use a wide range of approaches, e.g., language- or state-based regions, genetic mining, heuristics, expectation maximization, iterative log-splitting, etc. When models or logs become too large for analysis, the event log may be automatically decomposed or traces may be clustered before discovery. Clustering and decomposition are done automatically, i.e., no additional information is used. This paper proposes a different approach where a localized event log is assumed. Events are localized by assigning a non-empty set of regions to each event. It is assumed that regions can only interact through shared events. Consider for example the mining of software systems. The events recorded typically explicitly refer to parts of the system (components, services, etc.). Currently, such information is ignored during discovery. However, references to system parts may be used to localize events. Also in other application domains, it is possible to localize events, e.g., communication events in an organization may refer to multiple departments (that may be seen as regions). This paper proposes a generic process discovery approach based on localized event logs. The approach has been implemented in ProM and experimental results show that location information indeed helps to improve the quality of the discovered models.KeywordsVisible TraceConformance CheckVertical DecompositionInductive MinerUnique TraceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Optimizing sepsis care through heuristics methods in process mining: A trajectory analysis

Event logs are the primary source of information in process mining. An event log consists of events, each having three mandatory attributes: a case identifier, an activity, and a timestamp. Translucent event logs add a fourth mandatory attribute: enabled activities. These are activities for which execution was possible besides the executed activity. Information on enabled activities can be accessed in task management software, in tasks executed within a desktop environment, or by utilizing domain knowledge. Information on enabled activities is valuable for process discovery and other process mining tasks. For example, utilizing the information when discovering process models from translucent event logs results in more robust and generalizable process models. In recent work, translucent activity relationships were defined, and their application was shown by extending the inductive mining approach. This work extends the defined relationships by also introducing frequencies. As a result, the Inductive Miner—infrequent can be extended. Hence, it is possible to use these relationships in the presence of noise in the recorded event logs. We introduce three translucent variants for the Inductive Miner—infrequent, each using translucent activity relationships at different points. Moreover, we allow for different graphs when fall-throughs within the Inductive Miner occur. Using artificial and enriched real-life event logs, we show that considering these relationships, more data-specific process models that still have desired generalization capabilities can be discovered.

Process discovery aims to discover process models from event logs to describe actual business processes. The quality of event logs has an impact on the quality of process models, so preprocessing methods can be used to improve the quality of event logs. Chaotic activities may exist in real business scenarios, and the occurrence of chaotic activities is independent of other activities in the process and can occur at any location in the event log at any frequency. Therefore, chaotic activities seriously affect the model quality of process discovery. Filtering chaotic activities in event logs can effectively improve the quality of event logs and thus improve the quality of process models. The traditional chaotic activity filtering algorithm makes it difficult to balance accuracy and time performance. Therefore, a direct method for filtering chaotic activities is proposed in this paper. By analyzing the relationship between activities, chaotic activities are identified in the log according to the characteristics of chaotic activities and the direct following relationship of activities as the judgment condition, and the filtering of chaotic activities in the event log is realized. In addition, this paper proposes an indirect chaotic activity filtering method, which identifies and filters chaotic activities in the log by analyzing the influence of the existence of different activities on the overall chaos degree of the log. The proposed method is compared with the traditional chaotic activity filtering method on several simulation/real data sets, and the accuracy and running time between the multi-group event logs and the process models generated before and after chaotic activity filtering are analyzed, further verifying the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method. By summarizing the experimental results, it is found that the accuracy of the proposed chaotic activity filtering methods is greater than that of the frequency-based filtering method and is close to that of the entropy-based chaotic activity filtering methods. Moreover, compared with other filtering methods used in the experiment, the chaotic activity filtering method proposed in this paper can improve the efficiency by 23.4% on average for simulation logs, and by 84.25% on average for real event logs. It is concluded that compared with other filtering methods, the proposed chaotic activity filtering methods have higher accuracy and can effectively improve the time performance of chaotic activity filtering. Therefore, the chaotic activity filtering method proposed in this paper can balance the accuracy and time performance, and can ensure the integrity of the filtered event log to a certain extent.

Process mining techniques provide an opportunity for discovering information about process models in organizations or web based systems based on the execution of data registered in event logs. Lack of logical inference and observable abstractions on the data of the generated process models limit our analysis to nothing more than the bare bone structure regarding processes and connections among them. Ontology is the most intuitive yet powerful solution that can connect traditional data mining techniques and process mining techniques enriching the analysis based on specific or in general queries on the event logs or databases. Our objective of this paper is to translate the entirety of the process mining techniques to ontological representations. Performance matrices and process discovery techniques are the main aspects that need to be converted to ontological concepts. For analysis on real world event logs, we have chosen stack-overflow data in order to provide a tag based prediction technique.

Real-life business process event logs may suffer from significant data quality problems negatively influencing process mining analysis. Over time, a range of approaches has been developed to detect and repair these quality problems. Validation of these approaches tends to be challenging due to the lack of a ground truth. Moreover, the identification and definition of event log quality problems have been tackled mainly through a pattern-based approach, with systematic and extensible methods currently lacking. In this article, we present FLAWD , a formal language for describing event log data quality issues that enables solutions addressing the shortcomings of process mining data quality research identified above. FLAWD can be used to formally describe and possibly reason over event log data quality errors, as well as to guide the development of tools for controlled and sophisticated “polluting” of event logs through which benchmark datasets may be systematically created. We present the abstract syntax grammar of FLAWD and an open-source software tool based on it that allows for the insertion of all so-called event log imperfection patterns in a stochastic manner. We show how FLAWD has been used in our research to generate benchmark datasets and how it can be used to formally describe and replicate a range of errors found in real-life event logs.

Slice and Connect: Tri-Dimensional Process Discovery with Case Study of Port Logistics Process

Process mining facilitates the discovery, conformance, and enhancement of business processes using event logs. However, incomplete event logs and the complexities of concurrent activities present significant challenges in achieving accurate process models that fulfill the completeness condition required in process mining. This paper introduces a Timed Genetic-Inductive Process Mining (TGIPM) algorithm, a novel approach that integrates the strengths of Timed Genetic Process Mining (TGPM) and Inductive Mining (IM). TGPM extends traditional Genetic Process Mining (GPM) by incorporating time-based analysis, while the IM is widely recognized for producing sound and precise process models. For the first time, these two algorithms are combined into a unified framework to address both missing activity recovery and structural correctness in process discovery. This study evaluates two scenarios: a sequential approach, in which TGPM and IM are executed independently and sequentially, and the TGIPM approach, where both algorithms are integrated into a unified framework. Experimental results using real-world event logs from a health service in Indonesia demonstrate that TGIPM achieves higher fitness, precision, and generalization compared to the sequential approach, while slightly compromising simplicity. Moreover, the TGIPM algorithm exhibits lower computational cost and more effectively captures parallelism, making it particularly suitable for large and incomplete datasets. This research underscores the potential of TGIPM to enhance process mining outcomes, offering a robust framework for accurate and efficient process discovery while driving process innovation across industries.

Massive amounts of business process event logs are collected and stored by modern information systems. Numerous process discovery approaches have been proposed to extract descriptive process models from such event logs in the past decades. To improve process discovery efficiency, event log sampling techniques are proposed. A sample log is a delicately selected subset of the original log that requires less computational cost. However, existing sampling techniques have difficulties, e.g., low efficiency, in handling large-scale event logs. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel ranking-based event log sampling approach, denoted as \( LogRank^+ \), to support efficient sampling. In addition, we introduce a framework to evaluate the effectiveness of different sampling techniques by quantifying the sampling efficiency and the quality of sample logs. The proposed sampling approach has been implemented in the open-source process mining toolkit ProM. Experimental evaluation with both synthetic and real-life event logs demonstrates that the proposed sampling approach provides an effective solution to improve event log sampling efficiency as well as ensuring high quality of the obtained sample logs from a process discovery perspective.

In this work, we explore an approach to process discovery that is based on combining several existing process discovery algorithms. We focus on algorithms that generate process models in the process tree notation, which are sound by design. The main components of our proposed process discovery approach are the Inductive Miner, the Evolutionary Tree Miner, the Local Process Model Miner and a new bottom-up recursive technique. We conjecture that the combination of these process discovery algorithms can mitigate some of the weaknesses of the individual algorithms. In cases where the Inductive Miner results in overgeneralizing process models, the Evolutionary Tree Miner can often mine much more precise models. At the other hand, while the Evolutionary Tree Miner is computationally expensive, running it only on parts of the log that the Inductive Miner is not able to represent with a precise model fragment can considerably limit the search space size of the Evolutionary Tree Miner. Local Process Models and bottom-up recursion aid the Evolutionary Tree Miner further by instantiating it with frequent process model fragments. We evaluate our approaches on a collection of real-life event logs and find that it does combine the advantages of the miners and in some cases surpasses other discovery techniques.

The aim of process discovery is to build a process model from an event log without prior information about the process. The discovery of declarative process models is useful when a process works in an unpredictable and unstable environment since several allowed paths can be represented as a compact set of rules. One of the tools available in the literature for discovering declarative models from logs is the Declare Miner, a plug-in of the process mining tool ProM. Using this plug-in, the discovered models are represented using Declare, a declarative process modelling language based on LTL for finite traces. In this paper, we use a combination of an Apriori algorithm and a group of algorithms for Sequence Analysis to improve the performances of the Declare Miner. Using synthetic and real life event logs, we show that the new implemented core of the plug-in allows for a significant performance improvement.

Healthcare processes are inherently complex as each patient is unique and medical staff deviate from protocols, often for valid reasons. Event logs collected by modern process-aware (healthcare) information systems provide a wealth of data and can be used to analyze the adherence to these protocols. Process mining is a young research area combining data science (machine learning, data mining, etc.) and business process management. Its main contributions have been techniques for process discovery (the automatic learning of process models from event data) and conformance checking (aligning observed and modeled behavior). However, existing techniques face challenging issues discovering high-quality process models in a healthcare setting. In this chapter we introduce the key concepts of process mining such as event logs, process models, and process discovery. We then show the application of two recent process mining techniques on a public event data set from the healthcare domain to demonstrate how some of the common pitfalls can be overcome. A first presented technique projects data statistics on a process model, allowing the analysis of correlations between patient characteristics and the executed activities (e.g., type of treatment). A second technique analyzes process performance without a specific need for a process model by considering contextual information. It correlates process characteristics with process performance.

Process discovery, one of the key challenges in process mining, aims at discovering process models from process execution data stored in event logs. Most discovery algorithms assume that all data in an event log conform to correct execution of the process, and hence, incorporate all behaviour in their resulting process model. However, in real event logs, noise and irrelevant infrequent behaviour are often present. Incorporating such behaviour results in complex, incomprehensible process models concealing the correct and/or relevant behaviour of the underlying process. In this paper, we propose a novel general purpose filtering method that exploits observed conditional probabilities between sequences of activities. The method has been implemented in both the ProM toolkit and the RapidProM framework. We evaluate our approach using real and synthetic event data. The results show that the proposed method accurately removes irrelevant behaviour and, indeed, improves process discovery results.