Skip to main content

Event Abstraction for Process Mining Using Supervised Learning Techniques

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems ((LNNS,volume 15))

Abstract

Process mining techniques focus on extracting insight in processes from event logs. In many cases, events recorded in the event log are too fine-grained, causing process discovery algorithms to discover incomprehensible process models or process models that are not representative of the event log. We show that when process discovery algorithms are only able to discover an unrepresentative process model from a low-level event log, structure in the process can in some cases still be discovered by first abstracting the event log to a higher level of granularity. This gives rise to the challenge to bridge the gap between an original low-level event log and a desired high-level perspective on this log, such that a more structured or more comprehensible process model can be discovered. We show that supervised learning can be leveraged for the event abstraction task when annotations with high-level interpretations of the low-level events are available for a subset of the sequences (i.e., traces). We present a method to generate feature vector representations of events based on XES extensions, and describe an approach to abstract events in an event log with Condition Random Fields using these event features. Furthermore, we propose a sequence-focused metric to evaluate supervised event abstraction results that fits closely to the tasks of process discovery and conformance checking. We conclude this paper by demonstrating the usefulness of supervised event abstraction for obtaining more structured and/or more comprehensible process models using both real life event data and synthetic event data.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   169.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   219.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

References

  1. van der Aalst, W.M.P.: Process Mining: Discovery, Conformance and Enhancement of Business Processes. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)

    Book  MATH  Google Scholar 

  2. van der Aalst, W.M.P., Weijters, A.J.M.M., Maruster, L.: Workflow mining: discovering process models from event logs. IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. 16(9), 1128–1142 (2004)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Günther, C.W., van der Aalst, W.M.P.: Fuzzy mining-adaptive process simplification based on multi-perspective metrics. In: Business Process Management, pp. 328–343. Springer (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Van der Werf, J.M.E.M., van Dongen, B.F., Hurkens, C.A.J., Serebrenik, A.: Process discovery using integer linear programming. In: Applications and Theory of Petri Nets, pp. 368–387. Springer (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Weijters, A.J.M.M., Ribeiro, J.T.S.: Flexible heuristics miner (FHM). In: Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Data Mining, pp. 310–317. IEEE (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Leemans, S.J.J., Fahland, D., van der Aalst, W.M.P.: Discovering block-structured process models from event logs—a constructive approach. In: Application and Theory of Petri Nets and Concurrency. LNCS, pp. 311–329. Springer (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Bose, R.P.J.C., van der Aalst, W.M.P.: Abstractions in process mining: a taxonomy of patterns. In: Business Process Management. LNCS, pp. 159–175. Springer (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Günther, C.W., Rozinat, A., van der Aalst, W.M.P.: Activity mining by global trace segmentation. In: Business Process Management Workshops. LNBIP, pp. 128–139. Springer (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  9. van Dongen, B.F., Adriansyah, A.: Process mining: fuzzy clustering and performance visualization. In: Business Process Management Workshops. LNBIP, pp. 158–169. Springer (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Günther, C.W., Verbeek, H.M.W.: XES-standard definition (2014). BPMcenter.org

  11. van Kasteren, T., Noulas, A., Englebienne, G., Kröse, B.: Accurate activity recognition in a home setting. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, pp. 1–9. ACM (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Tapia, E.M., Intille, S.S., Larson, K.: Activity recognition in the home using simple and ubiquitous sensors. In: Ferscha, A., Mattern, F. (eds.) Pervasive Computing. LNCS, pp. 158–175. Springer (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Bao, L., Intille, S.S.: Activity recognition from user-annotated acceleration data. In: Ferscha, A., Mattern, F. (eds.) Pervasive Computing. LNCS, pp. 1–17. Springer (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Kwapisz, J.R., Weiss, G.M., Moore, S.A.: Activity recognition using cell phone accelerometers. ACM SIGKDD Explor. Newslett. 12(2), 74–82 (2011)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Poppe, R.: A survey on vision-based human action recognition. Image Vis. Comput. 28(6), 976–990 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Chen, L., Nugent, C.: Ontology-based activity recognition in intelligent pervasive environments. Int. J. Web Inf. Syst. 5(4), 410–430 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Riboni, D., Bettini, C.: OWL 2 modeling and reasoning with complex human activities. Pervasive Mob. Comput. 7(3), 379–395 (2011)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. van Kasteren, T., Kröse, B.: Bayesian activity recognition in residence for elders. In: Proceedings of the 3rd IET International Conference on Intelligent Environments, pp. 209–212. IEEE (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Lafferty, J., McCallum, A., Pereira, F.C.N.: Conditional random fields: probabilistic models for segmenting and labeling sequence data. In: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Machine Learning. Morgan Kaufmann (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Rabiner, L.R., Juang, B.-H.: An introduction to hidden Markov models. ASSP Mag. 3(1), 4–16 (1986)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Friedman, N., Geiger, D., Goldszmidt, M.: Bayesian network classifiers. Mach. Learn. 29(2–3), 131–163 (1997)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  22. Kim, E., Helal, S., Cook, D.: Human activity recognition and pattern discovery. Pervasive Comput. 9(1), 48–53 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Reisig, W.: Petri Nets: An Introduction, vol. 4. Springer, New York (2012)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  24. Murata, T.: Petri nets: properties, analysis and applications. Proc. IEEE 77(4), 541–580 (1989)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Verbeek, H.M.W., Buijs, J.C.A.M., Van Dongen, B.F., van der Aalst, W.M.P.: ProM 6: the process mining toolkit. In: Proceedings of the Business Process Management Demonstration Track, pp. 34–39 (2010). CEUR-WS.org

  26. Sutton, C.: GRMM: graphical models in mallet (2006). http://mallet.cs.umass.edu/grmm

  27. Andrew, G., Gao, J.: Scalable training of L1-regularized log-linear models. In: Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 33–40. ACM (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  28. Schwarz, G.: Estimating the dimension of a model. Ann. Stat. 6(2), 461–464 (1978)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  29. Levenshtein, V.I.: Binary codes capable of correcting deletions, insertions, and reversals. Soviet Physics Doklady 10, 707–710 (1966)

    MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  30. Bose, R.P.J.C., Verbeek, H.M.W., van der Aalst, W.M.P.: Discovering hierarchical process models using ProM. In: IS Olympics: Information Systems in a Diverse World, pp. 33–48. LNBIP. Springer (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  31. Bose, R.P.J.C.: Process mining in the large: preprocessing, discovery, and diagnostics. Ph.D. dissertation, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  32. Vanhatalo, J., Völzer, H., Koehler, J.: The refined process structure tree. Data Knowl. Eng. 68(9), 793–818 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Niek Tax .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG

About this paper

Cite this paper

Tax, N., Sidorova, N., Haakma, R., van der Aalst, W.M.P. (2018). Event Abstraction for Process Mining Using Supervised Learning Techniques. In: Bi, Y., Kapoor, S., Bhatia, R. (eds) Proceedings of SAI Intelligent Systems Conference (IntelliSys) 2016. IntelliSys 2016. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 15. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56994-9_18

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56994-9_18

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-56993-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-56994-9

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics