Heuristic Recovery of Missing Events in Process Logs

Event logs are of paramount significance for process mining and complex event processing. Yet, the quality of event logs remains a serious problem. Missing events of logs are usually caused by omitting manual recording, system failures, and hybrid storage of executions of different processes. It has been proved that the problem of minimum recovery based on a priori process specification is NP-hard. State-of-the-art approach is still lacking in efficiency because of the large search space. To address this issue, in this paper, we leverage the technique of process decomposition and present heuristics to efficiently prune the unqualified sub-processes that fail to generate the minimum recovery. We employ real-world processes and their incomplete sequences to evaluate our heuristic approach. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves high accuracy as the state-of-the-art approach does, but it is more efficient.