The Connection between Process Complexity of Event Sequences and Models discovered by Process Mining

TL;DR

This paper investigates how characteristics of event logs influence the quality of process models discovered through process mining, proposing a new complexity measure and analyzing its correlation with model quality.

Contribution

It introduces a new graph entropy-based process complexity measure and analyzes its relationship with process model quality across multiple logs.

Findings

Many complexity measures correlate with model quality

Complexity measures can predict process model quality

Highlights importance of input data characteristics in process mining

Abstract

Process mining is a research area focusing on the design of algorithms that can automatically provide insights into business processes. Among the most popular algorithms are those for automated process discovery, which have the ultimate goal to generate a process model that summarizes the behavior recorded in an event log. Past research had the aim to improve process discovery algorithms irrespective of the characteristics of the input log. In this paper, we take a step back and investigate the connection between measures capturing characteristics of the input event log and the quality of the discovered process models. To this end, we review the state-of-the-art process complexity measures, propose a new process complexity measure based on graph entropy, and analyze this set of complexity measures on an extensive collection of event logs and corresponding automatically discovered process models. Our analysis shows that many process complexity measures correlate with the quality of the discovered process models, demonstrating the potential of using complexity measures as predictors of process model quality. This finding is important for process mining research, as it highlights that not only algorithms, but also connections between input data and output quality should be studied.