Probabilistic workflow mining

In several organizations, it has become increasingly popular to document and log the steps that makeup a typical business process. In some situations, a normative workflow model of such processes is developed, and it becomes important to know if such a model is actually being followed by analyzing the available activity logs. In other scenarios, no model is available and, with the purpose of evaluating cases or creating new production policies, one is interested in learning a workflow representation of such activities. In either case, machine learning tools that can mine workflow models are of great interest and still relatively unexplored. We present here a probabilistic workflow model and a corresponding learning algorithm that runs in polynomial time. We illustrate the algorithm on example data derived from a real world workflow. Categories and Subject Descriptors G.3 [Mathematics of Computing]: PROBABILITY AND STATISTICS General Terms Algorithms Keywords Workflow mining, graphical...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: KDD
• Authors: Ricardo Silva, Jiji Zhang, James G. Shanahan
• Keywords: Data Mining, KDD 2005, Keywords Workflow Mining, Normative Workflow Model, Probabilistic Workflow Model