Advanced Methods in Business Process Deviance Mining
Name
Joonas Puura
Abstract
Business process deviance refers to the phenomenon whereby a subset of the executions of a business process deviate, in a negative or positive way, with respect to its expected or desirable outcomes. Deviant executions of a business process include those that violate compliance rules, or executions that undershoot or exceed performance targets. Deviance mining is concerned with uncovering the reasons for deviant executions by analyzing business process event logs.
In this thesis, the problem of explaining deviations in business processes is first investigated by using features based on sequential and declarative patterns, and a combination of them. The explanations are further improved by leveraging the data payload of events and traces in event logs through features based on pure data attribute values and data-aware declare constraints. The explanations characterizing the deviances are then extracted by direct and indirect methods for rule induction. Using synthetic and real-life logs from multiple domains, a range of feature types and different forms of decision rules are evaluated in terms of their ability to accurately discriminate between non-deviant and deviant executions of a process as well as in terms of the final outcome returned to the users.
In this thesis, the problem of explaining deviations in business processes is first investigated by using features based on sequential and declarative patterns, and a combination of them. The explanations are further improved by leveraging the data payload of events and traces in event logs through features based on pure data attribute values and data-aware declare constraints. The explanations characterizing the deviances are then extracted by direct and indirect methods for rule induction. Using synthetic and real-life logs from multiple domains, a range of feature types and different forms of decision rules are evaluated in terms of their ability to accurately discriminate between non-deviant and deviant executions of a process as well as in terms of the final outcome returned to the users.
Graduation Thesis language
English
Graduation Thesis type
Master - Computer Science
Supervisor(s)
Fabrizio Maria Maggi, Chiara Di Francescomarino and Chiara Ghidini
Defence year
2019