Qifan Chen

h-index2
2papers
15citations

2 Papers

1.2DBMar 30, 2021
A Multi-View Framework to Detect Redundant Activity Labels for More Representative Event Logs in Process Mining

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.

3.6IRMar 19, 2021
Detecting and Understanding Branching Frequency Changes in Process Models

Yang Lu, Qifan Chen, Simon Poon

Business processes are continuously evolving in order to adapt to changes due to various factors. One type of process changes are branching frequency changes, which are related to changes in frequencies between different options when there is an exclusive choice. Existing methods either cannot detect such changes or cannot provide accurate and comprehensive results. In this paper, we propose a method which takes both event logs and process models as input and generates a choice sequence for each exclusive choice in the process model. The method then identifies change points based on the choice sequences. We evaluate our method on a real-life event log. Results show that our method can identify branching frequency changes in process models and provide comprehensive results to users.