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Modelling Data-Aware Stochastic Processes - Discovery and Conformance Checking

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Application and Theory of Petri Nets and Concurrency (PETRI NETS 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13929))

Abstract

Process mining aims to analyse business process behaviour by discovering process models such as Petri nets from process executions recorded as sequential traces in event logs. Such discovered Petri nets capture the process behaviour observed in a log but do not provide insights on the likelihood of behaviour: the stochastic perspective. A stochastic Petri net extends a Petri net to explicitly encode the occurrence probabilities of transitions. However, in a real-life processes, the probability of a trace may depend on data variables: e.g., a higher requested loan amount will trigger additional checks. Such dependencies are not described by current stochastic Petri nets and corresponding stochastic process mining techniques. We extend stochastic Petri nets with data-dependent transition weights and provide a technique for learning them from event logs. We discuss how to evaluate the quality of these discovered models by deriving a stochastic data-aware conformance checking technique. The implementations are available in ProM, and we show on real-life event logs that the discovery technique is competitive with existing stochastic process discovery approaches, and that new types of stochastic data-based insights can be derived.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Note that our technique only considers numeric variables. Other types of variables can be mapped using a suitable encoding, such as one-hot-encoding.

  2. 2.

    Available in the nightly builds at https://promtools.org/.

  3. 3.

    https://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7578655.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, Netherlands

    Felix Mannhardt

  2. RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

    Sander J. J. Leemans & Christopher T. Schwanen

  3. University of Padova, Padua, Italy

    Massimiliano de Leoni

Authors
  1. Felix Mannhardt
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  2. Sander J. J. Leemans
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  3. Christopher T. Schwanen
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  4. Massimiliano de Leoni
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Felix Mannhardt .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. NOVA University Lisbon, Caparica, Portugal

    Luis Gomes

  2. University of Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany

    Robert Lorenz

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Mannhardt, F., Leemans, S.J.J., Schwanen, C.T., de Leoni, M. (2023). Modelling Data-Aware Stochastic Processes - Discovery and Conformance Checking. In: Gomes, L., Lorenz, R. (eds) Application and Theory of Petri Nets and Concurrency. PETRI NETS 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13929. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33620-1_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33620-1_5

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