Methods from the area of Process Mining traditionally focus on extracting insight in business processes from event logs. In this paper we explore the potential of Process Mining to provide valuable insights in (un)healthy habits and to contribute to ambient assisted living solutions when applied on data from smart home environments. Events in smart home environments are recorded at the level of sensor triggers, which is too low to mine habit-related behavioral patterns. Process discovery algorithms produce then overgeneralizing process models that allow for too much behavior and that are difficult to interpret for human experts. We show that abstracting the events to a higher-level interpretation can enable discovery of more precise and more comprehensible models. We present a framework to automatically abstract sensor-level events to their interpretation at the human activity level. Our framework is based on the XES IEEE standard for event logs. We use supervised learning techniques to train it on training data for which both the sensor and human activity events are known. We demonstrate our abstraction framework on three real-life smart home event logs and show that the process models that can be discovered after abstraction improve on precision as well as on F-score.
Process Mining is a technology for extracting non-trivial and useful information from execution logs. For example, there are many process mining techniques to automatically discover a process model describing the causal dependencies between activities . Unfortunately, the quality of a discovered process model strongly depends on the quality and suitability of the input data. For example, the logs of many real-life systems do not refer to the activities an analyst would have in mind, but are on a much more detailed level of abstraction. Trace segmentation attempts to group low-level events into clusters, which represent the execution of a higher-level activity in the (available or imagined) process meta-model. As a result, the simplified log can be used to discover better process models. This paper presents a new activity mining approach based on global trace segmentation. We also present an implementation of the approach, and we validate it using a real-life event log from ASML’s test process. The goal of performance analysis of business processes is to gain insights into operational processes, for the purpose of optimizing them. To intuitively show which parts of the process might be improved, performance analysis results can be projected onto process models. This way, bottlenecks can quickly be identified and resolved. Process mining refers to the extraction of process models from event logs. Real-life processes tend to be less structured and more flexible. Traditional process mining algorithms have problems dealing with such unstructured processes and generate spaghetti-like process models that are hard to comprehend. One reason for such a result can be attributed to constructing process models from raw traces without due pre-processing. In an event log, there can be instances where the system is subjected to similar execution patterns behavior. Discovery of common patterns of invocation of activities in traces (beyond the immediate succession relation) can help in improving the discovery of process models and can assist in defining the conceptual relationship between the tasks activities. In this paper, we characterize and explore the manifestation of commonly used process model constructs in the event log and adopt pattern definitions that capture these manifestations, and propose a means to form abstractions over these patterns. We also propose an iterative method of transformation of traces which can be applied as a pre-processing step for most of today's process mining techniques . The proposed approaches are shown to identify promising patterns and conceptually-valid abstractions on a real-life log. The patterns discussed in this paper have multiple applications such as trace clustering, fault diagnosis anomaly detection besides being an enabler for hierarchical process discovery.