All That Glitters Is Not Gold: Towards Process Discovery Techniques with Guarantees

The aim of a process discovery algorithm is to construct from event data a process model that describes the underlying, real-world process well. Intuitively, the better the quality of the event data, the better the quality of the model that is discovered. However, existing process discovery algorithms do not guarantee this relationship. We demonstrate this by using a range of quality measures for both event data and discovered process models. This paper is a call to the community of IS engineers to complement their process discovery algorithms with properties that relate qualities of their inputs to those of their outputs. To this end, we distinguish four incremental stages for the development of such algorithms, along with concrete guidelines for the formulation of relevant properties and experimental validation. We will also use these stages to reflect on the state of the art, which shows the need to move forward in our thinking about algorithmic process discovery.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures. Submitted to the International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, 202

Prototype Selection using Clustering and Conformance Metrics for Process Discovery

International audienceAutomated process discovery algorithms aim to automatically create process models based on event data that is captured during the execution of business processes. These algorithms usually tend to use all of the event data to discover a process model. Using all (i.e., less common) behavior may lead to discover imprecise and/or complex process models that may conceal important information of processes. In this paper, we introduce a new incremental prototype selection algorithm based on the clustering of process instances to address this problem. The method iteratively computes a unique process model from a different set of selected prototypes that are representative of whole event data and stops when conformance metrics decrease. This method has been implemented using both ProM and RapidProM. We applied the proposed method on several real event datasets with state-of-the-art process discovery algorithms. Results show that using the proposed method leads to improve the general quality of discovered process models