Advanced Process Discovery Techniques

Abstract

Given the challenges associated to the process discovery task, more than a hundred research studies addressed the problem over the past two decades. Despite the richness of proposals, many state-of-the-art automated process discovery techniques, especially the oldest ones, struggle to systematically discover accurate and simple process models. In general, when the behavior recorded in the input event log is simple (e.g., exhibiting little parallelism, repetitions, or inclusive choices) or noise free, some basic algorithms such as the alpha miner can output accurate and simple process models. However, as the complexity of the input data increases, the quality of the discovered process models can worsen quickly. Given that oftentimes real-life event logs record very complex and unstructured process behavior containing many repetitions, infrequent traces, and incomplete data, some state-of-the-art techniques turn unreliable and not purposeful. Specifically, they tend to discover process models that either have limited accuracy (i.e., low fitness and/or precision) or are syntactically incorrect. While currently there exists no perfect automated process discovery technique, some are better than others when discovering a process model from event logs recording complex process behavior. In this chapter, we introduce four of such techniques, discussing their underlying approach and algorithmic ideas, reporting their benefits and limitation, and comparing their performance with the algorithms introduced in the previous chapter.