In log and model we trust? A generalized conformance checking framework

Abstract

While models and event logs are readily available in modern organizations, their quality can seldom be trusted. Raw event recordings are often noisy, incomplete, and contain erroneous recordings. The quality of process models, both conceptual and data-driven, heavily depends on the inputs and parameters that shape these models, such as domain expertise of the modelers and the quality of execution data. The mentioned quality issues are specifically a challenge for conformance checking. Conformance checking is the process mining task that aims at coping with low model or log quality by comparing the model against the corresponding log, or vice versa. The prevalent assumption in the literature is that at least one of the two can be fully trusted. In this work, we propose a generalized conformance checking framework that caters for the common case, when one does neither fully trust the log nor the model. In our experiments we show that our proposed framework balances the trust in model and log as a generalization of state-of-the-art conformance checking techniques.