Aj Alfredo Bolt

Scientific workflows for process mining: building blocks, scenarios, and implementation

Over the past decade process mining has emerged as a new analytical discipline able to answer a variety of questions based on event data. Event logs have a very particular structure; events have timestamps, refer to activities and resources, and need to be correlated to form process instances. Process mining results tend to be very different from classical data mining results, e.g., process discovery may yield end-to-end process models capturing different perspectives rather than decision trees or frequent patterns. A process-mining tool like ProM provides hundreds of different process mining techniques ranging from discovery and conformance checking to filtering and prediction. Typically, a combination of techniques is needed and, for every step, there are different techniques that may be very sensitive to parameter settings. Moreover, event logs may be huge and may need to be decomposed and distributed for analysis. These aspects make it very cumbersome to analyze event logs manually. Process mining should be repeatable and automated. Therefore, we propose a framework to support the analysis of process mining workflows. Existing scientific workflow systems and data mining tools are not tailored towards process mining and the artifacts used for analysis (process models and event logs). This paper structures the basic building blocks needed for process mining and describes various analysis scenarios. Based on these requirements we implemented RapidProM, a tool supporting scientific workflows for process mining. Examples illustrating the different scenarios are provided to show the feasibility of the approach.

Multidimensional Process Mining Using Process Cubes

Process mining techniques enable the analysis of processes using event data. For structured processes without too many variations, it is possible to show a relative simple model and project performance and conformance information on it. However, if there are multiple classes of cases exhibiting markedly different behaviors, then the overall process will be too complex to interpret. Moreover, it will be impossible to see differences in performance and conformance for the different process variants. The different process variations should be analysed separately and compared to each other from different perspectives to obtain meaningful insights about the different behaviors embedded in the process. This paper formalizes the notion of process cubes where the event data is presented and organized using different dimensions. Each cell in the cube corresponds to a set of events which can be used as an input by any process mining technique. This notion is related to the well-known OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) data cubes, adapting the OLAP paradigm to event data through multidimensional process mining. This adaptation is far from trivial given the nature of event data which cannot be easily summarized or aggregated, conflicting with classical OLAP assumptions. For example, multidimensional process mining can be used to analyze the different versions of a sales processes, where each version can be defined according to different dimensions such as location or time, and then the different results can be compared. This new way of looking at processes may provide valuable insights for process optimization.

A visual approach to spot statistically-significant differences in event logs based on process metrics

This paper addresses the problem of comparing different variants of the same process. We aim to detect relevant differences between processes based on what was recorded in event logs. We use transition systems to model behavior and to highlight differences. Transition systems are annotated with measurements, used to compare the behavior in the variants. The results are visualized as transitions systems, which are colored to pinpoint the significant differences. The approach has been implemented in ProM, and the implementation is publicly available. We validated our approach by performing experiments using real-life event data. The results show how our technique is able to detect relevant differences undetected by previous approaches while it avoids detecting insignificant differences.

Online conformance checking: relating event streams to process models using prefix-alignments

Companies often specify the intended behaviour of their business processes in a process model. Conformance checking techniques allow us to assess to what degree such process models and corresponding process execution data correspond to one another. In recent years, alignments have proven extremely useful for calculating conformance checking statistics. Existing techniques to compute alignments have been developed to be used in an offline, a posteriori setting. However, we are often interested in observing deviations at the moment they occur, rather than days, weeks or even months later. Hence, we need techniques that enable us to perform conformance checking in an online setting. In this paper, we present a novel approach to incrementally compute prefix-alignments, paving the way for real-time online conformance checking. Our experiments show that the reuse of previously computed prefix-alignments enhances memory efficiency, whilst preserving prefix-alignment optimality. Moreover, we show that, in case of computing approximate prefix-alignments, there is a clear trade-off between memory efficiency and approximation error.

Finding Process Variants in Event Logs

The analysis of event data is particularly challenging when there is a lot of variability. Existing approaches can detect variants in very specific settings (e.g., changes of control-flow over time), or do not use statistical testing to decide whether a variant is relevant or not. In this paper, we introduce an unsupervised and generic technique to detect significant variants in event logs by applying existing, well-proven data mining techniques for recursive partitioning driven by conditional inference over event attributes. The approach has been fully implemented and is freely available as a ProM plugin. Finally, we validated our approach by applying it to a real-life event log obtained from a multinational Spanish telecommunications and broadband company, obtaining valuable insights directly from the event data.

Subgroup Discovery in Process Mining

Process mining enables multiple types of process analysis based on event data. In many scenarios, there are interesting subsets of cases that have deviations or that are delayed. Identifying such subsets and comparing process mining results is a key step in any process mining project.

Process variant comparison: Using event logs to detect differences in behavior and business rules

Abstract This paper addresses the problem of comparing different variants of the same process. We aim to detect relevant differences between processes based on what was recorded in event logs. We use transition systems to model behavior and to highlight differences. Transition systems are annotated with measurements, used to compare the behavior in the different variants. Decision points in the transition system are also analyzed, and the business rules of the process variants in such points are compared. The results are visualized as colored transitions systems, where the colored states and transitions indicate the existence and magnitude of differences. The approach has been implemented in ProM, and the implementation is publicly available. The approach has been evaluated using real-life data sets. The results show how our technique is able to detect relevant differences that could not be captured using existing approaches. Moreover, the user is not overloaded with diagnostics on differences that are less significant.

Business Process Comparison: A Methodology and Case Study

Business processes often exhibit a high degree of variability. Process variants may manifest due to the differences in the nature of clients, heterogeneity in the type of cases, etc. Through the use of process mining techniques, one can benefit from historical event data to extract non-trivial knowledge for improving business process performance. Although some research has been performed on supporting process comparison within the process mining context, applying process comparison in practice is far from trivial. Considering all comparable attributes, for example, leads to an exponential number of possible comparisons. In this paper we introduce a novel methodology for applying process comparison in practice. We successfully applied the methodology in a case study within Xerox Services, where a forms handling process was analyzed and actionable insights were obtained by comparing different process variants using event data.

Business Process Reporting Using Process Mining, Analytic Workflows and Process Cubes: A Case Study in Education

Business Process Intelligence (BPI) is an emerging topic that has gained popularity in the last decade. It is driven by the need for analysis techniques that allow businesses to understand and improve their processes. One of the most common applications of BPI is reporting, which consists on the structured generation of information (i.e., reports) from raw data. In this article, state-of-the-art process mining techniques are used to periodically produce automated reports that relate the actual performance of students of a Dutch University to their studying behavior. To avoid the tedious manual repetition of the same process mining procedure for each course, we have designed a workflow calling various process mining techniques using RapidProM. To ensure that the actual students’ behavior is related to their actual performance (i.e., grades for courses), our analytic workflows approach leverages on process cubes, which enable the dataset to be sliced and diced based on courses and grades. The article discusses how the approach has been operationalized and what is the structure and concrete results of the reports that have been automatically generated. Two evaluations were performed with lecturers using the real reports. During the second evaluation round, the reports were restructured based on the feedback from the first evaluation round. Also, we analyzed an example report to show the range of insights that they provide.