Change in Perspective with Process Mining
This article has been previously published as a guest post on the Data-Science-Blog (in German) and on KDnuggets (in English).
Data Scientists spend a large part of their day on exploratory analysis. In the 2015 Data Science Salary Survey, 46% of respondents said that they use one to three hours per day on the summarizing, visualization, and understanding of data, even more than on data cleansing and data preparation.
Process mining is focused on the analysis of processes, and it is an excellent tool in particular for the exploratory analysis of process-related data. If your data science project concerns business or IT processes, then you need to explore these processes and understand them first before you can train machine learning algorithms or run statistical analyses in any meaningful way.
With process mining you can get a process view of the data. The specific process view results from the following three parameters:
- Case ID: The selected case ID determines the scope of the process and connects the individual steps of a process instance from the beginning to the end (for example, a customer number, order number or patient ID)
- Activity: The activity name determines the steps that are shown in the process view (such as “order received” or “X-ray examination completed”).
- Timestamp: One or more timestamps per step (for example for the beginning and the end of an X-ray examination) are used to calculate the process sequence and to derive parallel process steps.
When you analyze a data set with process…
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.