Discovering and Analyzing Contextual Behavioral Patterns From Event Logs

Abstract

Event logs that are recorded by information systems provide a valuable starting point for the analysis of processes in various domains, reaching from healthcare, through logistics, to e-commerce. Specifically, behavioral patterns discovered from an event log enable operational insights, even in scenarios where process execution is rather unstructured and shows a large degree of variability. While such behavioral patterns capture frequently recurring episodes of a process’ behavior, they are not limited to sequential behavior but include notions of concurrency and exclusive choices. Existing algorithms to discover behavioral patterns are context-agnostic, though. They neglect the context in which patterns are observed, which severely limits the granularity at which behavioral regularities are identified. In this paper, we therefore present an approach to discover contextual behavioral patterns. Contextual patterns may be frequent solely in a certain partition of the event log, which enables fine-granular insights into the aspects that influence the conduct of a process. Moreover, we show how to analyze the discovered contextual behavioral patterns in terms of causal relations between context information and the patterns, as well as correlations between the patterns themselves. A complete analysis methodology leveraging all the tools presented in the paper and supplemented by interpretations guidelines is also provided. Finally, experiments with real-world event logs demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques in obtaining fine-granular process insights.