Exercise 6

For this exercise we will use exercise6.xes which is the result of a simulation.

  1. Start with a log inspection on exercise6.xes. What is remarkable about this event log?
  2. Optional: run the Dotted Chart Analysis on this event log to visualize it in another way.
  3. Create some process model(s) using two (or more) of the plug-ins from the previous exercises.
  4. Run the Fuzzy Miner on the event log, using the default settings. Now try to answer the following questions:
    1. What is remarkable about the resulting process model compared to the models discovered by the other plug-ins?
    2. The Fuzzy Miner tries to aggregate low frequent activities into clusters and only show edges which are significant enough. Using this brief explanation, can you indicate why the resulting process model looks so different?
    3. Read the documentation on the Fuzzy Miner.
    4. Play around with the settings of the Fuzzy Miner (the sliders you see on the right). What do you need to change to get closer to the models as discovered by the other plug-ins?
    5. Why do you think this model is still not exactly the same as the original model?
    6. On what kind of logs would the Fuzzy Miner be useful?
    7. Can you now think of some benefits but also some weak points of the Fuzzy Miner?
  5. Run the Transition System Miner on the event log. Be sure to set the “backward keys” to both “Event Name” and “Lifecycle transition” and not “Resource”, as is shown in the figure below.
  1. From the resulting transition system, press the “Play” button on the top right. Select the “Transition system analyzer” plug-in. Now click the “Log” object in the “input”column and select exercise6.xes. Now run the plug-in (press “Start”) and try to answer the following questions:
    1. How long does a case take on average? And what are the minimal and maximal durations recorded? On how many ways can you get this information from this plug-in?
    2. What do the red states indicate? And what do the red arrows indicate?
    3. On the top left, change the “Color By:” setting from “Sojourn” to “Elapsed”. Why is part of the process colored red and why are the last two events yellow?
    4. If we change the setting to remaining we see the first events colored red and 1 event colored yellow. Can you explain this? And why do you think that the outgoing arrow of the yellow event is colored red?

Solutions

  1. The most remarkable thing is that the event log includes events that are executed between 2006 and 2018. It also contains events of 2 types: start and complete. This allows for analysis of waiting and execution times.
  2. You should know how to do this but we won’t discuss things that you might discover.
  3. The Heuristics Miner and alpha-algorithm come up with correct models. If the Transition System Miner is run with the settings as explained later on, the model is also correct. When run with the default settings you end up with 2 end events which in essence are the same activities. The ILP Miner comes up with the result shown in the figure below which is slightly different. On the one hand it is simpler to read, on the other hand it allows for more behavior than recorded in the event log.
  1. Running the Fuzzy Miner with the default settings will result in the model as shown in the figure below.
    1. The resulting process model is entirely sequential while the other process models discovered from the same log are not.
    2. The Fuzzy Miner removes edges which are considered to be not relevant enough to show.
    3. The most important setting you need to change is the “Edge cutoff” as shown in the figure below. Changing other settings might also improve the result.
    1. The Fuzzy Miner takes many metrics into account when deriving nodes and edges, most of these are not used by other plug-ins. All metrics used by the Fuzzy Miner can be seen and changed by selecting the Metrics tab when starting the Fuzzy Miner.
    2. The Fuzzy Miner is particularly useful on large, unstructured and/or noisy logs.
    3. The main benefit is that it can cope with unstructured event logs. The main weak point is that the model discovered by the plug-in does not really contain any semantics and only indicates ‘relationships’ between nodes/events.
    1. You can answer this question if you select the first state and then inspect the metrics, as shown in the figure below. The remaining time after the first state is 1118 days and 4 hours on average. The minimal remaining time is 8 days while the longest remaining time is 4462 days. Another option is selecting the last state of the transition system and looking at the elapsed row in the metrics table.
    1. States and arcs are colored blue, yellow or red depending on the relative time spend there. In the figure below state 4 is red and selected. On the bottom of the screen some metrics are shown. Here we can see that the sojourn time is very high, hence the red color of the state. The red arrow is also colored red for the same reason. Apparently the time between starting and completing the registration of a claim takes 510 days on average. State 8, assessment of a claim, also takes a long time, 599 days on average.
    1. In the figure below this option is chosen and the second-last state is selected. The last two events are colored yellow because there are different ways to get there. A case is for instance already ended when insuffcient information is available or when the likelihood of the claim is deemed to low/high (we don’t know that). The part that is colored red is the path that a handled claim takes which takes longer than to be rejected.
    1. The figure below shows the result of this option with the one yellow state, state 8, selected. Of course, now the first part of the process is red because it can take a long time before the process is completed. State 8 is colored yellow because activity Assess Claim can take quite a while but does not qualify for the color red yet.