Trace clustering in process mining

Abstract

Process mining has proven to be a valuable tool for analyzing operational process executions based on event logs. Existing techniques perform well on structured processes, but still have problems discovering and visualizing less structured ones. Unfortunately, process mining is most interesting in domains requiring flexibility. A typical example would be the treatment process in a hospital where it is vital that people can deviate to deal with changing circumstances. Here it is useful to provide insights into the actual processes but at the same time there is a lot of diversity leading to complex models that are difficult to interpret. This paper presents an approach using trace clustering, i.e., the event log is split into homogeneous subsets and for each subset a process model is created. We demonstrate that our approach, based on log profiles, can improve process mining results in real flexible environments. To illustrate this we present a real-life case study. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.