Enhancing Process Discovery by Optimizing Imprecise Sub-Processes

Jiaxin Yan

doi:10.1109/TSC.2026.3652280

Enhancing Process Discovery by Optimizing Imprecise Sub-Processes

2026-01-12

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DOI：10.1109/TSC.2026.3652280

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Process discovery aims to derive a process model that accurately represents the observed behavior in an event log. As a state-of-the-art process discovery technique, Inductive Miner (IM) generates sound process models (i.e., free of deadlocks) while ensuring optimal replay fitness. However, IM may sometimes produce over-generalized process models with locally imprecise structures, often resulting in the creation of so-called flower structures. To address this limitation, this paper presents a novel technique that refines the process model generated by IM by optimizing its imprecise sub-processes. Specifically, the technique begins by identifying and extracting sub-logs corresponding to imprecise sub-processes in the initial IM-generated process model. Then, these imprecise sub-processes are iteratively optimized using a frequency-based filtering mechanism applied to the sub-logs. Once optimized, the imprecise sub-processes in the initial process model are replaced by the optimized ones, generating a set of candidates process models. Finally, the candidate with the best quality, in terms of fitness and precision, is selected as the final optimized process model. The proposed technique has been implemented as a plugin for the open-source process mining platform ProM. Through comparisons with state-of-the-art process discovery techniques using 10 publicly available real-life event logs, the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves an average absolute improvement of 0.173 in F-measure over its IMi variant, while also exhibiting competitive performance relative to other state-of-the-art approaches.

Keywords:

Process mining

process discovery

inductive miner

sub-process optimization

Petri nets

Enhancing Process Discovery by Optimizing Imprecise Sub-Processes

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