This post is by Majid Rafiei, Scientific Assistant in the Process And Data Science group at RWTH Aachen University. Contact him via email for further inquiries.
Event logs are the type of data used by process mining algorithms to provide valuable insights regarding the real processes running in a company, organization, hospital, university, etc. However, they often contain sensitive private information that should be analyzed responsibly.
Privacy issues in process mining are recently receiving more attention. Privacy-preserving techniques need to modify the original data, yet, at the same time, they are supposed to preserve the data utility. Different data utility definitions can be used depending on the sensitivity of certain aspects and the goal of the analysis. Privacy-preserving transformations of the data may lead to incorrect or misleading analysis results. Hence, new infrastructures need to be designed for publishing the privacy-aware event data whose aim is to provide metadata regarding the privacy-related transformations on event data without revealing details of privacy techniques or the protected information.
Compare Table 1 with Table 2. They both look like an original event log, right? Can you recognize the relation between these two tables? If one of them was derived from another one, which one is the original? How did the derivation happen? What are the weaknesses of the analyses done on the derived event log?
In fact, Table 2 is derived from Table 1 by randomly substituting some activities (f was substituted with g and k), generalizing the timestamps (the timestamps got generalized to the minutes level), and suppressing some resources (B1 was suppressed). Hence, a performance analysis based on Table 2 may not be as accurate as the original event log, the process model discovered from Table 2 contains some fake activities, and the social network of resources is incomplete.
We have a paper under review to address such challenges by proposing privacy metadata for process mining.