When Incomplete Cases Shouldn’t Be Removed
This is the fourth and last 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.
There are also situations in which you should not remove incomplete cases from your data set. Here are two examples:
Many compliance questions like the check for segregation of duties (see Segregation of Duties Analysis) can be best verified on the full data set. If you have a compliance rule that should be followed in a certain part of the process, then this should also be true for cases that have not reached the end of the process yet. So, by focusing your compliance analysis on only the completed cases you might unnecessarily limit your analysis.
For example, in the refund process customers should only receive their payment after they have returned the broken product to the manufacturer. The refund order does not need to have reached the state ‘Order completed’ for this compliance rule to hold. So, you can best perform the analysis on the full data set to make sure you catch all the deviations.
Be careful, however, to understand what the pre-conditions for the compliance rule are and filter your data set in such a way that the pre-conditions are met. For example, if your purchasing process requires that an order needs to be approved again after a change was made, then you might not have seen the approval step yet but it could
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