Process Discovery is concerned with the automatic generation of a process model that describes a business process from execution data of that business process. Real life event logs can contain chaotic activities. These activities are independent of the state of the process and can, therefore, happen at rather arbitrary points in time. We show that the presence of such chaotic activities in an event log heavily impacts the quality of the process models that can be discovered with process discovery techniques. The current modus operandi for filtering activities from event logs is to simply filter out infrequent activities. We show that frequency-based filtering of activities does not solve the problems that are caused by chaotic activities. Moreover, we propose a novel technique to filter out chaotic activities from event logs. We evaluate this technique on a collection of seventeen real-life event logs that originate from both the business process management domain and the smart home environment domain. As demonstrated, the developed activity filtering methods enable the discovery of process models that are more behaviorally specific compared to process models that are discovered using standard frequency-based filtering.
@cite_13 proposed a technique to identify outlier traces from the event log that consists of two steps: 1) mining frequent patterns from the event log, and 2) applying MCL clustering @cite_33 on the traces, where the similarity measure for traces is defined on the number of patterns that jointly characterize the execution of the traces. Traces that are not assigned to a cluster by the MCL clustering algorithm are considered to be outlier traces and are filtered from the event log. It is easy to see that trace filtering techniques address a fundamentally different problem than chaotic activity filtering: in the event log shown in Figure there are only two traces that do not contain an instance of chaotic activity @math , therefore, even if a trace filtering technique would be able to perfectly filter out traces that contain a chaotic event, the number of remaining traces will become too small to mine a fitting and precise process model when the chaotic activity is frequent.
@cite_13 @cite_33
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Process mining techniques focus on extracting insight in processes from event logs. In many cases, events recorded in the event log are too fine-grained, causing process discovery algorithms to discover incomprehensible process models or process models that are not representative of the event log. We show that when process discovery algorithms are only able to discover an unrepresentative process model from a low-level event log, structure in the process can in some cases still be discovered by first abstracting the event log to a higher level of granularity. This gives rise to the challenge to bridge the gap between an original low-level event log and a desired high-level perspective on this log, such that a more structured or more comprehensible process model can be discovered. We show that supervised learning can be leveraged for the event abstraction task when annotations with high-level interpretations of the low-level events are available for a subset of the sequences (i.e., traces). We present a method to generate feature vector representations of events based on XES extensions, and describe an approach to abstract events in an event log with Condition Random Fields using these event features. Furthermore, we propose a sequence-focused metric to evaluate supervised event abstraction results that fits closely to the tasks of process discovery and conformance checking. We conclude this paper by demonstrating the usefulness of supervised event abstraction for obtaining more structured and or more comprehensible process models using both real life event data and synthetic event data. This paper addresses the problem of predicting the outcome of an ongoing case of a business process based on event logs. In this setting, the outcome of a case may refer for example to the achievement of a performance objective or the fulfillment of a compliance rule upon completion of the case. Given a log consisting of traces of completed cases, given a trace of an ongoing case, and given two or more possible outcomes e.g., a positive and a negative outcome, the paper addresses the problem of determining the most likely outcome for the case in question. Previous approaches to this problem are largely based on simple symbolic sequence classification, meaning that they extract features from traces seen as sequences of event labels, and use these features to construct a classifier for runtime prediction. In doing so, these approaches ignore the data payload associated to each event. This paper approaches the problem from a different angle by treating traces as complex symbolic sequences, that is, sequences of events each carrying a data payload. In this context, the paper outlines different feature encodings of complex symbolic sequences and compares their predictive accuracy on real-life business process event logs. Classical outlier detection approaches may hardly fit process mining applications, since in these settings anomalies emerge not only as deviations from the sequence of events most often registered in the log, but also as deviations from the behavior prescribed by some (possibly unknown) process model. These issues have been faced in the paper via an approach for singling out anomalous evolutions within a set of process traces, which takes into account both statistical properties of the log and the constraints associated with the process model. The approach combines the discovery of frequent execution patterns with a cluster-based anomaly detection procedure; notably, this procedure is suited to deal with categorical data and is, hence, interesting in its own, given that outlier detection has mainly been studied on numerical domains in the literature. All the algorithms presented in the paper have been implemented and integrated into a system prototype that has been thoroughly tested to assess its scalability and effectiveness. Business processes are prone to subtle changes over time, as unwanted behavior manifests in the execution over time. This problem is related to anomaly detection, as these subtle changes start of as anomalies at first, and thus it is important to detect them early. However, the necessary process documentation is often outdated, and thus not usable. Moreover, the only way of analyzing a process in execution is the use of event logs coming from process-aware information systems, but these event logs already contain anomalous behavior and other sorts of noise. Classic process anomaly detection algorithms require a dataset that is free of anomalies; thus, they are unable to process the noisy event logs. Within this paper we propose a system, relying on neural network technology, that is able to deal with the noise in the event log and learn a representation of the underlying model, and thus detect anomalous behavior based on this representation. We evaluate our approach on five different event logs, coming from process models with different complexities, and demonstrate that our approach yields remarkable results of 97.2 F1-score in detecting anomalous traces in the event log, and 95.6 accuracy in detecting the respective anomalous activities within the traces.