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Event logs that are recorded by information systems provide a valuable starting point for the analysis of processes in various domains, reaching from healthcare, through logistics, to e-commerce. Specifically, behavioral patterns discovered from an event log enable operational insights, even in scenarios where process execution is rather unstructured and shows a large degree of variability. While such behavioral patterns capture frequently recurring episodes of a process’ behavior, they are not limited to sequential behavior but include notions of concurrency and exclusive choices. Existing algorithms to discover behavioral patterns are context-agnostic, though. They neglect the context in which patterns are observed, which severely limits the granularity at which behavioral regularities are identified. In this paper, we therefore present an approach to discover contextual behavioral patterns. Contextual patterns may be frequent solely in a certain partition of the event log, which enables fine-granular insights into the aspects that influence the conduct of a process. Moreover, we show how to analyze the discovered contextual behavioral patterns in terms of causal relations between context information and the patterns, as well as correlations between the patterns themselves. A complete analysis methodology leveraging all the tools presented in the paper and supplemented by interpretations guidelines is also provided. Finally, experiments with real-world event logs demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques in obtaining fine-granular process insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the advancement of cloud computing, many challenging scientific problems can be solved using scientific workflow technology which integrates geo-distributed instruments, applications, and big data effectively and efficiently. For workflow collaboration, the workflow protocols of all participants are needed. However, workflow protocols are not always available and are often outdated as the workflow evolve frequently. To address this problem, we propose a novel workflow discovery approach which can extract up-to-date scientific workflow protocols from public event logs in clouds, without the need to access the full-fledged event logs involving private events. Our approach leverages transitive precedence relations between events to achieve this. We implement our approach as a ProM plug-in, and evaluate it through extensive experiments on event logs of real-world scientific workflows. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach requires a weaker completeness notion of event logs than the state-of-the-art do, and our approach derives the same workflow protocol from the public event log as that discovered from the original event log, and thus the private events can be protected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central problem in the area of Process Mining is to obtain a formal model that represents the processes that are conducted in a system. If realized, this simple motivation allows for powerful techniques that can be used to formally analyze and optimize a system, without the need to resort to its semiformal and sometimes inaccurate specification. The problem addressed in this paper is known as Process Discovery: to obtain a formal model from a set of system executions. The theory of regions is a valuable tool in process discovery: it aims at learning a formal model (Petri nets) from a set of traces. On its genuine form, the theory is applied on an automaton and therefore one should convert the traces into an acyclic automaton in order to apply these techniques. Given that the complexity of the region-based techniques depends on the size of the input automata, revealing the underlying cycles and folding the initial automaton can incur in a significant complexity alleviation of the region-based techniques. In this paper, we follow this idea by incorporating region information in the cycle detection algorithm, enabling the identification of complex cycles that cannot be obtained efficiently with state-of-the-art techniques. The experimental results obtained by the devised tool suggest that the techniques presented in this paper are a big step into widening the application of the theory of regions in Process Mining for industrial scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]