Process mining is a research field focused on the analysis of event data with the aim of extracting insights related to dynamic behavior. Applying process mining techniques on data from smart home environments has the potential to provide valuable insights in (un)healthy habits and to contribute to ambient assisted living solutions. Finding the right event labels to enable the application of process mining techniques is however far from trivial, as simply using the triggering sensor as the label for sensor events results in uninformative models that allow for too much behavior (overgeneralizing). Refinements of sensor level event labels suggested by domain experts have been shown to enable discovery of more precise and insightful process models. However, there exists no automated approach to generate refinements of event labels in the context of process mining. In this paper we propose a framework for the automated generation of label refinements based on the time attribute of events, allowing us to distinguish behaviourally different instances of the same event type based on their time attribute. We show on a case study with real life smart home event data that using automatically generated refined labels in process discovery, we can find more specific, and therefore more insightful, process models. We observe that one label refinement could have an effect on the usefulness of other label refinements when used together. Therefore, we explore four strategies to generate useful combinations of multiple label refinements and evaluate those on three real life smart home event logs.
Another area of related work is data-aware process mining, where the aim is to discover rules with regard to data attributes of events that decide decision points in the process. De Leoni and van der Aalst @cite_44 proposed a method that discovers data guards for decision points in the process based on alignments and decision tree learning. This approach relies on the discovery of a behaviorally well-fitting process model from the original event log. When only overgeneralizing process models (i.e., allowing for too much behavior) can be discovered from an event log, the correct decision points might not be present in the discovered process model at all, resulting in this approach not being able to discover the data dependencies that are in the event log. Our label refinements use data attributes prior to process discovery to enable the discovery of more behaviorally constrained process models by bringing parts of the event attribute space to the event label.
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Process discovery, i.e., learning process models from event logs, has attracted the attention of researchers and practitioners. Today, there exists a wide variety of process mining techniques that are able to discover the control-flow of a process based on event data. These techniques are able to identify decision points, but do not analyze data flow to find rules explaining why individual cases take a particular path. Fortunately, recent advances in conformance checking can be used to align an event log with data and a process model with decision points. These alignments can be used to generate a well-defined classification problem per decision point. This way data flow and guards can be discovered and added to the process model.