Multi-perspective Comparison of Business Process Variants Based on Event Logs

A process variant represents a collection of cases with certain shared characteristics, e.g. cases that exhibit certain levels of performance. The comparison of business process variants based on event logs is a recurrent operation in the field of process mining. Existing approaches focus on comparing variants based on directly-follows relations such as "a task directly follows another one" or a "resource directly hands-off to another resource". This paper presents a more general approach to log-based process variant comparison based on so-called perspective graphs. A perspective graph is a graph-based abstraction of an event log where a node represents any entity referred to in the log (e.g. task, resource, location) and an arc represents a relation between these entities within or across cases (e.g. directly-follows, co-occurs, hands-off to, works-together with). Statistically significant differences between two perspective graphs are captured in a so-called differential perspective graph, which allows us to compare two logs from any perspective. The paper illustrates the approach and compares it to an existing baseline using real-life event logs.