This post is by Marco Pegoraro, Scientific Assistant in the Process And Data Science group at RWTH Aachen University. Contact him via email for further inquiries.
When applying process mining in real-life settings, the need to address anomalies in data recording when performing analyses is omnipresent. A number of such anomalies can be modeled by using the notion of uncertainty: uncertain event logs contain, alongside the event data, some attributes that describe a certain level of uncertainty affecting the data.
Uncertainty can be addressed by filtering out the affected events when it appears sporadically throughout an event log. Conversely, in situations where uncertainty affects a signifi cant fraction of an event log, fi ltering away uncertain events can lead to information loss such that analysis becomes very difficult. In this circumstance, it is important to deploy process mining techniques that allow to mine information also from the uncertain part of the process.
In the paper “Discovering Process Models from Uncertain Event Data” (Marco Pegoraro, Merih Seran Uysal, Wil M.P. van der Aalst) we present a methodology to obtain Uncertain Directly-Follows Graphs (UDFGs), models based on directed graphs that synthesize information about the uncertainty contained in the process. We then show how to convert UDFGs in models with execution semantics via fi ltering on uncertainty information and inductive mining.