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Expert-driven trace clustering with instance-level constraints

Knowledge and Information Systems volume 63, pages 1197–1220 (2021)Cite this article

Abstract

Within the field of process mining, several different trace clustering approaches exist for partitioning traces or process instances into similar groups. Typically, this partitioning is based on certain patterns or similarity between the traces, or driven by the discovery of a process model for each cluster. The main drawback of these techniques, however, is that their solutions are usually hard to evaluate or justify by domain experts. In this paper, we present two constrained trace clustering techniques that are capable to leverage expert knowledge in the form of instance-level constraints. In an extensive experimental evaluation using two real-life datasets, we show that our novel techniques are indeed capable of producing clustering solutions that are more justifiable without a substantial negative impact on their quality.

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Notes

  1. ProM is the leading open-source process mining framework for academicians and practitioners, see: promtools.org.

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Acknowledgements

This research has been financed in part by the EC H2020 MSCA RISE NeEDS Project (Grant agreement ID: 822214)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. KU Leuven, Research Center for Management Informatics (LIRIS), Naamsestraat 69, 3000, Leuven, Belgium

    Pieter De Koninck, Klaas Nelissen, Seppe vanden Broucke, Bart Baesens, Monique Snoeck & Jochen De Weerdt

  2. Southampton Business School, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK

    Bart Baesens

Authors
  1. Pieter De Koninck
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  2. Klaas Nelissen
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  3. Seppe vanden Broucke
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  4. Bart Baesens
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Correspondence to Pieter De Koninck.

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De Koninck, P., Nelissen, K., vanden Broucke, S. et al. Expert-driven trace clustering with instance-level constraints. Knowl Inf Syst 63, 1197–1220 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-021-01548-6

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Keywords

  • Trace clustering
  • Process mining
  • Semi-supervised learning
  • Constrained clustering

Mathematics Subject Classification

  • 62H30
  • 91C20