Simon K. Poon

Yang Lu, Qifan Chen, Simon K. Poon

Process mining is a relatively new subject that builds a bridge between traditional process modeling and data mining. Process discovery is one of the most critical parts of process mining, which aims at discovering process models automatically from event logs. The performance of existing process discovery algorithms can be affected when there are missing activity labels in event logs. Several methods have been proposed to repair missing activity labels, but their accuracy can drop when a large number of activity labels are missing. In this paper, we propose an LSTM-based prediction model to predict the missing activity labels in event logs. The proposed model takes both the prefix and suffix sequences of the events with missing activity labels as input. Additional attributes of event logs are also utilized to improve the performance. Our evaluation of several publicly available datasets shows that the proposed method performed consistently better than existing methods in terms of repairing missing activity labels in event logs.

Qifan Chen, Yang Lu, Charmaine S. Tam et al.

Process mining aims to gain knowledge of business processes via the discovery of process models from event logs generated by information systems. The insights revealed from process mining heavily rely on the quality of the event logs. Activities extracted from different data sources or the free-text nature within the same system may lead to inconsistent labels. Such inconsistency would then lead to redundancy in activity labels, which refer to labels that have different syntax but share the same behaviours. Redundant activity labels could introduce unnecessary complexities to the event logs. The identifications of these labels from data-driven process discovery are difficult and rely heavily on human intervention. Neither existing process discovery algorithms nor event data preprocessing techniques can solve such redundancy efficiently. In this paper, we propose a multi-view approach to automatically detect redundant activity labels using not only context-aware features such as control--flow relations and attribute values but also semantic features from the event logs. Our evaluation of several publicly available datasets and a real-life case study demonstrate that our approach can efficiently detect redundant activity labels even with low-occurrence frequencies. The proposed approach can add value to the preprocessing step to generate more representative event logs.