Utilizing Concept Drift for Measuring the Effectiveness of Policy Interventions: The Case of the COVID-19 Pandemic

As a reaction to the high infectiousness and lethality of the COVID-19 virus, countries around the world have adopted drastic policy measures to contain the pandemic. However, it remains unclear which effect these measures, so-called non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), have on the spread of the virus. In this article, we use machine learning and apply drift detection methods in a novel way to predict the time lag of policy interventions with respect to the development of daily case numbers of COVID-19 across 9 European countries and 28 US states. Our analysis shows that there are, on average, more than two weeks between NPI enactment and a drift in the case numbers

Detection and removal of infrequent behavior from event streams of business processes

Process mining aims at gaining insights into business processes by analyzing the event data that is generated and recorded during process execution. The vast majority of existing process mining techniques works offline, i.e. using static, historical data, stored in event logs. Recently, the notion of online process mining has emerged, in which techniques are applied on live event streams, i.e. as the process executions unfold. Analyzing event streams allows us to gain instant insights into business processes. However, most online process mining techniques assume the input stream to be completely free of noise and other anomalous behavior. Hence, applying these techniques to real data leads to results of inferior quality. In this paper, we propose an event processor that enables us to filter out infrequent behavior from live event streams. Our experiments show that we are able to effectively filter out events from the input stream and, as such, improve online process mining results