Addressing multi-users open challenge in habit mining for a process mining-based approach

Models of human habits in smart spaces can be expressed by using a multitude of formalisms, whose readability influences the possibility of being validated by human experts. Given the growing availability of low-cost sensing devices promoted by the emerging Internet-of-Things, the analysis of huge amount of data produced by these systems will assume an utmost importance in the near future. But most of them are designed for single user cases. Moving forward in their development, often they hardly fit a realistic environment with many users. In this paper, we first review the most relevant approaches in the area during the last decade, and then we present an analysis pipeline that allows, starting from the sensor log of a smart space, to model human habits in a multi-user environment. The approach is based on exploit BLE beacons to discriminate the different users, then applying techniques borrowed from the area of business process automation and mining on a version of the sensor log preprocessed in order to translate raw sensor measurements into human actions. The paper also presents some hints of how the proposed method can be employed to automatically extract models to be reused for ambient intelligence in a multi-users environment.