Detecting Process Concept Drifts from Event Logs

Abstract

Traditional process discovery algorithms assume processes to be in a steady state. However, process models tend to be dynamic due to various factors, which has brought challenges such as change point detection, change localization and change process discovery. Existing techniques to identify change points are sensitive to parameters and the accuracy is not satisfactory. This paper proposes a novel approach to deal with such concept drift phenomenon. Event logs can be characterized by the relationships between activities, which motivates us to transform a log into a relation matrix. By detecting the always and never intervals in each row of the relation matrix, we obtain candidate change points for each relation. Finally, all the candidate change points are combined into an overall result. The approach is also able to localize the changes between different phases. Experiments on synthetic logs show that our approach is accurate and performs better than the state of the art in detecting sudden drift.