The Different Meanings of “Finished”
This is the third article in our series on how to deal with incomplete cases in process mining. You can find an overview of all articles in the series here.
Once you have determined what your startpoints and what your endpoints are, you still need to think about what “finished” or “completed” actually means for your process.
Multiple interpretations are possible and the differences can be subtle, but you will need to use different filters depending on the meaning that you want to apply. The results will be different and you need to be clear about which meaning is right for your data set.
Here are four examples for how you can filter incomplete cases. It’s not that any of these are better or more appropriate than others in general. Instead, it depends on your process and on the meaning of “finished” that you want to choose.
Ended In
Perhaps the most common meaning of “finished” is to look at which activities have occurred as the very last activity (for end points) or as the very first activity (for start points) in a case.
This corresponds to the dashed lines that you see in the process map and you can use the Endpoints Filter in Discard cases mode to filter all cases that start or end with a particular set of activities (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Use the use the Endpoints Filter in Discard cases mode to filter all cases that start or end with a particular
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