Systematic Mapping Review on Log Preparation for Process Mining

Process Mining (PM) is a research discipline that helps organizations track and optimize processes to support their business. Further, it focuses on providing process analysis techniques and tools, and several of its applications have been described in the literature. The start point for PM is using event logs generated by information systems to analyze processes. These event logs need to be extracted from databases and prepared for use because the quality of the event logs used as input is critical to the success of any PM effort. In this article, we present a systematic mapping review to provide the reader with highlights of the state-of-the-art techniques for event log preparation. Based on the retrieved studies, we identified six main categories of log preparation techniques: extraction, cleaning, repair, non-adequate granularity, quality evaluation, and privacy. The results are explored quantitatively and qualitatively. All results are made available through spreadsheets and charts. We believe this paper is a starting point for researchers to identify the studies that would help them prepare event logs for PM.