A relational data warehouse for multidimensional process mining

Abstract

Multidimensional process mining adopts the concept of data cubes to split event data into a set of homogenous sublogs according to case and event attributes. For each sublog, a separated process model is discovered and compared to other models to identify group-specific differences for the process. For an effective explorative process analysis, performance is vital due to the explorative characteristics of the analysis. We propose to adopt well-established approaches from the data warehouse domain based on relational databases to provide acceptable performance. In this paper, we present the underlying relational concepts of PMCube, a data-warehouse-based approach for multidimensional process mining. Based on a relational database schema, we introduce generic query patterns which map OLAP queries onto SQL to push the operations (i.e. aggregation and filtering) to the database management system. We evaluate the run-time behavior of our approach by a number of experiments. The results show that our approach provides a significantly better performance than the state-of-the-art for multidimensional process mining and scales up linearly with the number of events.