How To Deal With Incomplete Cases in Process Mining
[This article previously appeared in the Process Mining News – Sign up now to receive regular articles about the practical application of process mining.]
Before you start with your process mining analysis, you need to assess whether your data is suitable for process mining and check your data for data quality problems (see also our Data Quality series here). Afterwards, one of the next steps is to understand how you can differentiate between complete and incomplete cases in your process.
An ‘incomplete case’ is a case where either the start or the end of the process is missing. There can be different reasons for why a case is incomplete, such as:
Your data extraction method has retrieved only events in a certain timeframe. For example, let’s say that you have extracted all the process steps that were performed in a particular year. Some cases may have actually started in the previous year (before January). Furthermore, some cases may have started in the year that you are looking at but continued until the next year (after December). In this situation, you will only see the part of these cases that took place in the year that you are analyzing.
Some cases have not finished yet. Even if you have extracted all the data there is, some of the cases may not have finished yet. This means that, if you are extracting your process mining data today, some of the cases may have started recently and did not yet progress
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