Using multi-target feature evaluation to discover factors that affect business process behavior

Abstract

Certain business environments, like health-care or customer service, host complex and highly variable business processes. In such situations, we expect fluctuating process behavior, which is difficult to attribute to specific causes, at least automatically. This work aims to provide process analysts with an additional tool to discover factors that affect the process flow. To this end, we propose a three-stage methodology to deal with the several challenges of this goal.Adhering to the process mining paradigm that suggests for evidence-based process analysis and improvement, we introduce a horizontal partitioning approach to identify elements of process behavior during the first stage. Then, during the second stage, we discuss how log manipulations can yield characteristics that reflect various perspectives of the process. Finally, we propose a multi-target feature evaluation step to deliver insights about the associations between characteristics and process behavior.The proposed methodology is designed to tackle challenges related to the general correlation problem of process mining, like dealing with general process behavior (not just local decisions) and relaxing the independence assumption among the elements of behavior. We demonstrate our approach step by step through a case study on a real-world, open dataset.