The WHY in Business Processes: Discovery of Causal Execution Dependencies

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Fournier, Fabiana, Limonad, Lior, Skarbovsky, Inna, David, Yuval
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2023
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author Fournier, Fabiana
Limonad, Lior
Skarbovsky, Inna
David, Yuval
author_facet Fournier, Fabiana
Limonad, Lior
Skarbovsky, Inna
David, Yuval
contents Unraveling the causal relationships among the execution of process activities is a crucial element in predicting the consequences of process interventions and making informed decisions regarding process improvements. Process discovery algorithms exploit time precedence as their main source of model derivation. Hence, a causal view can supplement process discovery, being a new perspective in which relations reflect genuine cause-effect dependencies among the tasks. This calls for faithful new techniques to discover the causal execution dependencies among the tasks in the process. To this end, our work offers a systematic approach to the unveiling of the causal business process by leveraging an existing causal discovery algorithm over activity timing. In addition, this work delves into a set of conditions under which process mining discovery algorithms generate a model that is incongruent with the causal business process model, and shows how the latter model can be methodologically employed for a sound analysis of the process. Our methodology searches for such discrepancies between the two models in the context of three causal patterns, and derives a new view in which these inconsistencies are annotated over the mined process model. We demonstrate our methodology employing two open process mining algorithms, the IBM Process Mining tool, and the LiNGAM causal discovery technique. We apply it to a synthesized dataset and two open benchmark datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_14975
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The WHY in Business Processes: Discovery of Causal Execution Dependencies
Fournier, Fabiana
Limonad, Lior
Skarbovsky, Inna
David, Yuval
Artificial Intelligence
Unraveling the causal relationships among the execution of process activities is a crucial element in predicting the consequences of process interventions and making informed decisions regarding process improvements. Process discovery algorithms exploit time precedence as their main source of model derivation. Hence, a causal view can supplement process discovery, being a new perspective in which relations reflect genuine cause-effect dependencies among the tasks. This calls for faithful new techniques to discover the causal execution dependencies among the tasks in the process. To this end, our work offers a systematic approach to the unveiling of the causal business process by leveraging an existing causal discovery algorithm over activity timing. In addition, this work delves into a set of conditions under which process mining discovery algorithms generate a model that is incongruent with the causal business process model, and shows how the latter model can be methodologically employed for a sound analysis of the process. Our methodology searches for such discrepancies between the two models in the context of three causal patterns, and derives a new view in which these inconsistencies are annotated over the mined process model. We demonstrate our methodology employing two open process mining algorithms, the IBM Process Mining tool, and the LiNGAM causal discovery technique. We apply it to a synthesized dataset and two open benchmark datasets.
title The WHY in Business Processes: Discovery of Causal Execution Dependencies
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.14975