Trace Clustering: A Preprocessing Method to Improve the Performance of Process Discovery

Abstract

The information system collects a large number of business process event logs, and process discovery aims to discover process models from the event logs. Many process discovery methods have been proposed, but most of them still have problems when processing event logs, such as low mining efficiency and poor process model quality. The trace clustering method allows to decompose original log to effectively solve these problems. There are many existing trace clustering methods, such as clustering based on vector space approaches, context-aware trace clustering, model-based sequence clustering, etc. The clustering effects obtained by different trace clustering methods are often different. Therefore, this paper proposes a preprocessing method to improve the performance of process discovery, called as trace clustering. Firstly, the event log is decomposed into a set of sub-logs by trace clustering method, Secondly, the sub-logs generate process models respectively by the process mining method. The experimental analysis on the datasets shows that the method proposed not only effectively improves the time performance of process discovery, but also improves the quality of the process model.