Measuring Fitness and Precision of Automatically Discovered Process Models: A Principled and Scalable Approach

Automated process discovery techniques allow us to generate a process model from an event log consisting of a collection of business process execution traces. The quality of process models generated by these techniques can be assessed with respect to several criteria, including fitness, which captures the degree to which the generated process model is able to recognize the traces in the event log, and precision, which captures the extent to which the behavior allowed by the process model is observed in the event log. A range of fitness and precision measures have been proposed in the literature. However, existing measures in this field do not fulfil basic monotonicity properties and/or they suffer from scalability issues when applied to models discovered from real-life event logs. This article presents a family of fitness and precision measures based on the idea of comparing the kth order Markovian abstraction of a process model against that of an event log. The article shows that this family of measures fulfils the aforementioned properties for suitably chosen values of k. An empirical evaluation shows that representative exemplars of this family of measures yield intuitive results on a synthetic dataset of model-log pairs, while outperforming existing measures of fitness and precision in terms of execution times on real-life event logs.