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Process mining is a relatively new subject that builds a bridge between traditional process modeling and data mining. Process discovery is one of the most critical parts of process mining, which aims at discovering process models automatically from event logs. The performance of existing process discovery algorithms can be affected when there are missing activity labels in event logs. Several methods have been proposed to repair missing activity labels, but their accuracy can drop when a large number of activity labels are missing. In this paper, we propose an LSTM-based prediction model to predict the missing activity labels in event logs. The proposed model takes both the prefix and suffix sequences of the events with missing activity labels as input. Additional attributes of event logs are also utilized to improve the performance. Our evaluation of several publicly available datasets shows that the proposed method performed consistently better than existing methods in terms of repairing missing activity labels in event logs.

Process mining is a relatively new subject which builds a bridge between process modelling and data mining. An exclusive choice in a process model usually splits the process into different branches. However, in some processes, it is possible to switch from one branch to another. The inductive miner guarantees to return sound process models, but fails to return a precise model when there are switch behaviours between different exclusive choice branches due to the limitation of process trees. In this paper, we present a novel extension to the process tree model to support switch behaviours between different branches of the exclusive choice operator and propose a novel extension to the inductive miner to discover sound process models with switch behaviours. The proposed discovery technique utilizes the theory of a previous study to detect possible switch behaviours. We apply both artificial and publicly-available datasets to evaluate our approach. Our results show that our approach can improve the precision of discovered models by 36% while maintaining high fitness values compared to the original inductive miner., Comment: ICPM Workshop 2020

Process mining aims to gain knowledge of business processes via the discovery of process models from event logs generated by information systems. The insights revealed from process mining heavily rely on the quality of the event logs. Activities extracted from different data sources or the free-text nature within the same system may lead to inconsistent labels. Such inconsistency would then lead to redundancy in activity labels, which refer to labels that have different syntax but share the same behaviours. Redundant activity labels could introduce unnecessary complexities to the event logs. The identifications of these labels from data-driven process discovery are difficult and rely heavily on human intervention. Neither existing process discovery algorithms nor event data preprocessing techniques can solve such redundancy efficiently. In this paper, we propose a multi-view approach to automatically detect redundant activity labels using not only context-aware features such as control--flow relations and attribute values but also semantic features from the event logs. Our evaluation of several publicly available datasets and a real-life case study demonstrate that our approach can efficiently detect redundant activity labels even with low-occurrence frequencies. The proposed approach can add value to the preprocessing step to generate more representative event logs.

Process mining acts as a valuable tool to analyse the behaviour of an organisation by offering techniques to discover, monitor and enhance real processes. The key to process mining is to discovery understandable process models. However, real-life logs can be complex with redundant activities, which share similar behaviour but have different syntax. We show that the existence of such redundant activities heavily affects the quality of discovered process models. Existing approaches filter activities by frequency, which cannot solve problems caused by redundant activities. In this paper, we propose first to discover redundant activities in the log level and, then, use the discovery results to simplify event logs. Two publicly available data sets are used to evaluate the usability of our approach in real-life processes. Our approach can be adopted as a preprocessing step before applying any discovery algorithms to produce simplify models., Comment: There exist technical errors in the paper

Business processes are continuously evolving in order to adapt to changes due to various factors. One type of process changes are branching frequency changes, which are related to changes in frequencies between different options when there is an exclusive choice. Existing methods either cannot detect such changes or cannot provide accurate and comprehensive results. In this paper, we propose a method which takes both event logs and process models as input and generates a choice sequence for each exclusive choice in the process model. The method then identifies change points based on the choice sequences. We evaluate our method on a real-life event log. Results show that our method can identify branching frequency changes in process models and provide comprehensive results to users.