Visual Analytics Meets Process Mining: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Summary form only given, as follows. The complete presentation was not made available for publication as part of the conference proceedings. Visual Analytics integrates the outstanding capabilities of humans in terms of visual information exploration with the enormous processing power of computers to form a powerful knowledge discovery environment. In other words, Visual Analytics is the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive interfaces and captures the information discovery process keeping the human in the loop. Process Mining aims to extract information and knowledge from event logs to discover, monitor, and improve processes in a variety of application domains. Such event data or traces of activities often possess data quality issues as well as exhibit unexpected behavior and complex relations. Consequently, before and during the implementation of interactive (automated or semi-automated) analysis methods, such as Process Mining algorithms, the analyst needs to explore, investigate, and understand the data at hand in order to decide which analysis methods might be appropriate. The combination of interactive visual data analyses and exploration with Process Mining algorithms makes complex information structures more comprehensible and facilitates new insights. In this talk, I will illustrate the concepts of Visual Analytics, how Visual Analytics combined with Process Mining techniques supports to extract more insights from complex event data, and elaborate about the challenges and opportunities for analyzing process data with Visual Analytics methods. Various examples will illustrate what has been achieved so far and show possible future directions and challenges.