Process Model Discovery from Sensor Event Data

Virtually all techniques, developed in the area of process mining, assume the input event data to be discrete, and, at a relatively high level (i.e., close to the business-level). However, in many cases, the event data generated during the execution of a process is at a much lower level of abstraction, e.g., sensor data. Hence, in this paper, we present a novel technique that allows us to translate sensor data into higher-level, discrete event data, thus enabling existing process mining techniques to work on data tracked at a sensory level. Our technique discretises the observed sensor data into activities by applying unsupervised learning in the form of clustering. Furthermore, we refine the observed sequences by deducing imperative sub-models for the observed discretised data, i.e., allowing us to identify concurrency and interleaving within the data. We evaluated the approach by comparing the obtained model quality for several clustering techniques on a publicly available data-set in a smart home scenario. Our results show that applying our framework combined with a clustering technique yields results on data that otherwise would not be suitable for process discovery.