1. A General Framework for Correlating Business Process Characteristics
Massimiliano de Leoni, Wil M. P. van der Aalst, Marcus Dees

2. Introduction / Process Mining Performance Related
What do the cases that are late have in common?
Do people work faster if they have more work?
Resource Related
What characterizes the workers that skip such-an-such checking activity?
Which types of claims are more prone to lead to wrong treatments by resources?
Cost and Risk Related
Which types of claims are more risky or more expensive? … A B
Discovery
model
event log
Information System
Conformance
/ A B
model
Correlation Analysis
Process Mining

3. The problem of correlating process characteristic
any process characteristic to
other process characteristics associated with
given events
Configurable
Dependent
Independent
Configurable
Event Filtering Configurable

4. A General framework for correlating process characteristics
Dependent Characteristic, Independent Characteristics, Filtering
Dependent Characteristic, Independent Characteristics, Trace Manipulation, Filtering
Event Log
Process Model
1. Define Analysis Use Case
AnalysisUse Case
2. Manipulate and Enrich Event log
...
Additional Objects
Context Data
If analysis needs to be refined
Event Log
Conformance
Resource
Time
Data
Weather ...
2. Make Analysis
3. Make Analysis
Analysis Result

5. Example: Relating the cost of First Hospital Admission to the performing resource / 1
Case ID
Timestamp
Activity
Resource
Cost 1
:08.27
First Hospital Admission
Carol 90
:13.24
Preoperative Screening
Susanne
350
:8.30
Laparoscopic Gastrectomy
Andrew
500
:13.30
Nursing
Paul
250 2
:11.00
Giuseppe
:15.28
Simon
:16.35
Clare
:13.00
:15.00
:9.00
Victor 34 3
:10.00
Jane
200
:13.24
Giulia
:16.35 4
:14.00
Gianluca
Robert
:16.35
:11.00
:16.00
300
Dependent characteristic: Cost
Independent characteristics: Resource
Filtering: Retain all events for First Hospital Admission

6. Example: Relating the cost of First Hospital Admission to the performing resource / 2
Problem: Dependent characteristics defined over continuous domain
Solution: Discretization techniques: equal-width or equal-frequency binning
Dependent characteristic: Cost
Independent characteristics: Resource
Filtering: Retain all events for First Hospital Admission
Resource!=“Jane”
Resource=“Jane”
(50,200)
(200,300)

7. Example: Decision Point Analysis
What determines what to do as next
when reaching a decision point?
salary
age
installment
amount
length
Decision
Points

8. Example: Decision Point Analysis / 2
Trace augmentation is needed
Case ID
Timestamp
Activity
Resource
Cost 1
:08.27
First Hospital Admission
Carol 90
:13.24
Preoperative Screening
Susanne
350
:8.30
Laparoscopic Gastrectomy
Andrew
500
:13.30
Nursing
Paul
250 2
:11.00
Giuseppe
:15.28
Simon
:16.35
Clare
:13.00
:15.00
:9.00
Victor 34 3
:10.00
Jane
200
:13.24
Giulia
:16.35 4
:14.00
Gianluca
Robert
:16.35
:11.00
:16.00
300
Next Activity in Trace
Preoperative Screening
Laparoscopic Gastrectomy
Nursing
null
First Hospital Admission

9. Example: Decision Point Analysis / 2
Independent Characteristics
Dependent Characteristic
Case ID
Timestamp
Activity
Resource
Cost 1
:08.27
First Hospital Admission
Carol 90
:13.24
Preoperative Screening
Susanne
350
:8.30
Laparoscopic Gastrectomy
Andrew
500
:13.30
Nursing
Paul
250 2
:11.00
Giuseppe
:15.28
Simon
:16.35
Clare
:13.00
:15.00
:9.00
Victor 34 3
:10.00
Jane
200
:13.24
Giulia
:16.35 4
:14.00
Gianluca
Robert
:16.35
:11.00
:16.00
300
Next Activity in Trace
Preoperative Screening
Laparoscopic Gastrectomy
Nursing
null
First Hospital Admission

10. Example: Duration of case executions
Dependent Characteristic
Many well-studied problems are just ad-hoc instances for our framework

11. Implementation of the framework
Reference Implementation available for ProM 6.4
Check out the FeaturePrediction package of ProM
The main input is an event log
Additional input objects may be required for specific log manipulations
Join the demo session on Wednesday from to 17.30!!

12. A step-through guide: existing the duration of activities
Health-care Process enacted in a Dutch hospital.
How is the duration of Doctor appointments related to the patient characteristics and his/her treatment?

13. Selection of the characteristics to consider & Augmentation

14. Filtering on activity names
We should only consider activity Afspraak (Dutch term for Appointment)

15. Choosing the dependent characteristic & parameter for constructing decision trees
Parameters for building decision trees

16. Discretization Equal-width binning
The entire range is divided in n intervals of equal size
Equal-frequency
The entire range is divided in n intervals such that each interval contains the same number of observed values.
n = Number of bins

17. The resulting Decision Tree
Correlating the duration of execution of activity Afspraak to the other characterists of the process

18. The UWV case study
UWV is the institute that manage the unemployment benefits in the Netherlands.
UWV opens a reclamation when one receives unemployment benefits although not entitled.
UWV eventually discovers it.
In many cases, the excessive amount is not recollected.
UWV wants to predict the risk of eventual reclamations
For prediction, one needs to relate reclamations to the characterists of the customer and the process execution

19. Customer-related question
Are customer characteristics linked to the occurrence of reclamations?

20. Conformance-related question
If the prescribed process flow is not followed, will this influence whether or not a reclamation occurs?

21. Conclusion
Proposed a framework to correlate business process characteristics
Useful for operational support (prediction and recommendation) and process improvement
Many well-studied problems are just ad-hoc instances for our framework, such as:
Decision Point Analysis
Prediction of the Remaining Time to the end of instance
Decision Support Systems to reduce costs, risks, non-conformance, global execution time
Implemented in ProM, Customizable and Extendible

22. Join the demo session on?
Join the demo session on
Wednesday from to 17.30!!