Data Quality Problems in Process Mining and What To Do About Them — Part 9: Missing Timestamps
This is the ninth article in our series on data quality problems for process mining. You can find an overview of all articles in the series here.
Earlier in this series, we have talked about how missing data can be a problem. We looked at missing events, missing attribute values, and missing case IDs. But what do you do if you have missing activities, or missing timestamps for some activities?
There are two scenarios for missing timestamps.
1. Missing activities
Some activities in your process may not be recorded in the data. For example, there may be manual activities (like a phone call) that people perform at their desk. These activities occur in the process but are not visible in the data.
Of course, the process map that you discover using process mining will not show you these manual activities. What you will see is a path from the activity that happened before the manual activity to the activity that happened after the manual activity.
For example, in the process map below you see the sandbox example in Disco. There is a path from activity Create Request for Quotation to Analyze Request for Quotation. However, it could be that there was actually another activity that took place between these two process steps, which is not visible in the data.
How to fix:
There is not much you can do here. What is important is to be aware that these activities take place…
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