Process Mining Concepts for Discovering User Behavioral Patterns in Instrumented Software

Process Mining is a technique for discovering “in-use” processes from traces emitted to event logs. Researchers have recently explored applying this technique to documenting processes discovered in software applications. However, the requirements for emitting events to support Process Mining against software applications have not been well documented. Furthermore, the linking of end-user intentional behavior to software quality as demonstrated in the discovered processes has not been well articulated. After evaluating the literature, this thesis suggested focusing on user goals and actual, in-use processes as an input to an Agile software development life cycle in order to improve software quality. It also provided suggestions for instrumenting software applications to support Process Mining techniques

Leveraging Anomaly Detection in Business Process with Data Stream Mining

Identifying fraudulent or anomalous business procedures is today a key challenge for organisations of any dimension. Nonetheless, the continuous nature of business activities conveys to the continuous acquisition of data in support of business process monitoring. In light of this, we propose a method for online anomaly detection in business processes. From a stream of events, our approach extract cases descriptors and applies a density-based clustering technique to detect outliers. We applied our method to a real-life dataset, and we used streaming clustering measures for evaluating performances. Exploring different combinations of parameters, we obtained promising performance metrics, showing that our method is capable of finding anomalous process instances in a vast complexity of scenarios

Mining Transaction Data for Process Instance Monitoring in Legacy Systems

End-to-End business processes in organizations are implemented across multiple applications, legacy systems, ERP systemsand products. In such scenarios where applications are developed over a period of time and with varying technologies,monitoring end-to-end business processes is a challenge. Typical methods for providing process monitoring capabilities areintrusive methods like changing code and introducing probes; or introducing new software tools like EAI and BAM. Wepropose a non-intrusive process instance monitoring (PIM) method that uses the persistent data generated by the businesstransactions to monitor the process instances in Legacy Information Systems. We propose a slightly unconventional datamining method where the transaction data is parsed from the application data stores, loaded into custom schema and thenassociated to the process flow for monitoring the state of individual process instances. The approach further provides foralerting when business events like an SLA violation occur

A unified view of data-intensive flows in business intelligence systems : a survey

Data-intensive flows are central processes in today’s business intelligence (BI) systems, deploying different technologies to deliver data, from a multitude of data sources, in user-preferred and analysis-ready formats. To meet complex requirements of next generation BI systems, we often need an effective combination of the traditionally batched extract-transform-load (ETL) processes that populate a data warehouse (DW) from integrated data sources, and more real-time and operational data flows that integrate source data at runtime. Both academia and industry thus must have a clear understanding of the foundations of data-intensive flows and the challenges of moving towards next generation BI environments. In this paper we present a survey of today’s research on data-intensive flows and the related fundamental fields of database theory. The study is based on a proposed set of dimensions describing the important challenges of data-intensive flows in the next generation BI setting. As a result of this survey, we envision an architecture of a system for managing the lifecycle of data-intensive flows. The results further provide a comprehensive understanding of data-intensive flows, recognizing challenges that still are to be addressed, and how the current solutions can be applied for addressing these challenges.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft