Mining predictive process models out of low-level multidimensional logs

Abstract

Process Mining techniques have been gaining attention, especially as concerns the discovery of predictive process models. Traditionally focused on workflows, they usually assume that process tasks are clearly specified, and referred to in the logs. This limits however their application to many real-life BPM environments (e.g. issue tracking systems) where the traced events do not match any predefined task, but yet keep lots of context data. In order to make the usage of predictive process mining to such logs more effective and easier, we devise a new approach, combining the discovery of different execution scenarios with the automatic abstraction of log events. The approach has been integrated in a prototype system, supporting the discovery, evaluation and reuse of predictive process models. Tests on real-life data show that the approach achieves compelling prediction accuracy w.r.t. state-of-the-art methods, and finds interesting activities' and process variants' descriptions. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.