Process mining aims to extract and analyze insights from event logs, yet algorithm metric results vary widely depending on structural event log characteristics. Existing work often evaluates algorithms on a fixed set of real-world event logs but lacks a systematic analysis of how event log characteristics impact algorithms individually. Moreover, since event logs are generated from processes, where characteristics co-occur, we focus on associational rather than causal effects to assess how strong the overlapping individual characteristic affects evaluation metrics without assuming isolated causal effects, a factor often neglected by prior work. We introduce SHAining, the first approach to quantify the marginal contribution of varying event log characteristics to process mining algorithms’ metrics. Using process discovery as a downstream task, we analyze over 22,000 event logs covering a wide span of characteristics to uncover which affect algorithms across metrics (e.g., fitness, precision, complexity) the most. Furthermore, we offer novel insights about how the value of event log characteristics correlates with their contributed impact, assessing the algorithm’s robustness.

Business processes from many domains like manufacturing, healthcare, or business administration suffer from different amounts of uncertainty concerning the execution of individual activities and their order of occurrence. As long as a process is not entirely serial, i.e., there are no forks or decisions to be made along the process execution, we are - in the absence of exhaustive domain knowledge - confronted with the question whether and in what order activities should be executed or left out for a given case and a desired outcome. As the occurrence or non-occurrence of events has substantial implications regarding process key performance indicators like throughput times or scrap rate, there is ample need for assessing and modeling that process-inherent uncertainty. We propose a novel way of handling the uncertainty by leveraging the probabilistic mechanisms of Bayesian Networks to model processes from the structural and temporal information given in event log data and offer a comprehensive evaluation of uncertainty by modelling cases in their entirety. In a thorough analysis of well-established benchmark datasets, we show that our Process-aware Bayesian Network is capable of answering process queries concerned with any unknown process sequence regarding activities and/or attributes enhancing the explainability of processes. Our method can infer execution probabilities of activities at different stages and can query probabilities of certain process outcomes. The key benefit of the Process-aware Query System over existing approaches is the ability to deliver probabilistic, case-diagnostic information about the execution of activities via Bayesian inference.

Outlier detection is one of the most important tasks to keep your processes in control. Unawareness of critical anomalies can lead to exhausting expenses, hence, it is highly beneficial to treat process failures as soon as possible. However, anomalies are difficult to detect due to their rarity though they occur too often to neglect the necessity of its detection. Even if the detection problem is solved, the treatment of singular anomalies and the adjustment of the process based on each abnormal trace is tedious and costly regarding time and money. To increase the efficiency of later anomaly treatment, we propose a novel strategy to detect collective anomalies. However, this is not equivalent to anomaly clustering as a post-processing step. TOAD orders process instances by similarity and detects abnormal accumulations of deviating cases. These collections are abnormal due to their aggregated behavior. Assuming that similar deviations are caused by the same reason, the treatment of such an anomaly is more cost-efficient than the handling of deviating singletons. Applying TOAD to an event log yields a ranking of significant, temporally abnormal trace collections, that provide a baseline for further analysis.