Automatic root cause identification using most probable alignments

Abstract

In many organizational contexts, it is important that behavior conforms to the intended behavior as specified by process models. Non-conforming behavior can be detected by aligning process actions in the event log to the process model. A probable alignment indicates the most likely root cause for non-conforming behavior. Unfortunately, available techniques do not always return the most probable alignment and, therefore, also not the most probable root cause. Recognizing this limitation, this paper introduces a method for computing the most probable alignment. The core idea of our approach is to use the history of an event log to assign probabilities to the occurrences of activities and the transitions between them. A theoretical evaluation demonstrates that our approach improves upon existing work.