The effect of noise on mined declarative constraints

Declarative models are increasingly utilized as representational format in process mining. Models created from automatic process discovery are meant to summarize complex behaviors in a compact way. Therefore, declarative models do not define all permissible behavior directly, but instead define constraints that must be met by each trace of the business process. While declarative models provide compactness, it is up until now not clear how robust or sensitive different constraints are with respect to noise. In this paper, we investigate this question from two angles. First, we establish a constraint hierarchy based on formal relationships between the different types of Declare constraints. Second, we conduct a sensitivity analysis to investigate the effect of noise on different types of declarative rules. Our analysis reveals that an increasing degree of noise reduces support of many constraints. However, this effect is moderate on most of the constraint types, which supports the suitability of Declare for mining event logs with noise. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2015.