Discovery of frequent episodes in event logs

Abstract

Lion’s share of process mining research focuses on the discovery of end-to-end process models describing the characteristic behavior of observed cases. The notion of a process instance (i.e., the case) plays an important role in process mining. Pattern mining techniques (such as traditional episode mining, i.e., mining collections of partially ordered events) do not consider process instances. In this paper, we present a new technique (and corresponding implementation) that discovers frequently occurring episodes in event logs, thereby exploiting the fact that events are associated with cases. Hence, the work can be positioned in-between process mining and pattern mining. Episode Discovery has its applications in, amongst others, discovering local patterns in complex processes and conformance checking based on partial orders. We also discover episode rules to predict behavior and discover correlated behaviors in processes, and apply our technique to other perspectives present in event logs. We have developed a ProM plug-in that exploits efficient algorithms for the discovery of frequent episodes and episode rules. Experimental results based on real-life event logs demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of the approach.