Hey everybody. If you’re reading this, I’ve discontinued the use of this blog. I have exported all the content to my new site: jpsierens.com Everything is available there and I will only check that site from now on.
I haven’t received the data on my case. But it will probably be from the domain of healthcare. That means I will receive an event log from a healthcare institution and apply process mining on it.
I’ve been working on a matrix as requested by my promoter. As we don’t know the specific domain from where my data will come from. I am to create this matrix in order to more generally understand what plug ins are used for what domains. On one dimension you have the plug-ins and on the other the domains where the plug-ins are being used in. This means doing a lot of research on domain specific case studies in process mining. The matrix will help by giving an overview of what plug-ins are used where, which ones work and which ones don’t do so well, based on the case studies.
Sadly there’s not a lot of case studies. There is a substantial amount of literature on process mining, but limited applications on it. So my matrix will not be that complete. Although there are a few cases on healthcare so I already started focusing on the feedback of plug-ins used there. Other domains I’ve seen so far include financial services and public services.
I will show the matrix once it’s finished, as for now It’s just a work in progress.
More on Discovery Plug-ins for ProM.
Last week I talked about the discovery plug-ins for the tool ProM, which only take the event log as the input. I showed how to mine the control-flow perspective of a process only by mining the event log, using as example the alpha-algorithm. By doing this, you answer the question “How are the cases actually being executed?”.
These plug-ins are basically process mining algorithms. You give them the event-log as input, and then you ‘mine’ the event log for something. Which means you run the algorithm and it goes through the event log and returns something (for example: petri nets or control-flow perspective), depending on what kind of algorithm it is.
Now there’s other things you can mine with discovery plug-ins. You can mine case-related information about a process. By doing this, you answer the questions “What are the most frequent paths in the process?”, “Are there any loops?”, “Can I simplify the log by abstracting the most frequent paths?”.
You can mine organisational related information about a process. This answers questions like “How many people are involved in a specific case?”, “What is the communication structure and dependencies among people?”, etc. You mine this with the social-network miner plug-in.
If you just want to know how many people are involved at all the cases in the log, you can simply use the log summary:
I’m still using the same example as the last post, which is the event log of the (one) process of a telephone repair company. You can see the different resources above. We have testers, solvers, and the system. So to answer the question, there’s 12 people involved in all the cases together. You can also use the inspector to inspect specific cases (process instances) at a time and check who was involved.
For the rest of the questions, you can use the social network plug-in. For example, let’s check if there are employees who outperform others. We can find out who is better at fixing defects. We first filter the event log to only show us the relevant tasks on solvers. Then we run the plug-in to mine for a handover-of-work social network. We get this:
The graph shows which employees handed over work to other employees in the cases(process instances). SolverS3 and solverC3 have the best performance. Because the telephones that they fix, always pass the tests, and therefore, are not resent to the repair department, and therefore are not resent to other solvers. That’s why you don’t see arrows going out of these two employees, only arrows coming to them, which means they get work handed over from other solvers. As far as the oval shapes go, taken from the tutorial:
The oval shape of the nodes in the graph visually expresses the relation between the in and out degree of the connections (arrows) between these nodes. A higher proportion of in-going arcs lead to more vertical oval shapes while higher proportions of outgoing arcs produce more horizontal oval shapes. From this remark, can you tell
which employee has more problems to fi x the defects?
To answer the question from the tutorial, It seems that solverS2 and solverS1 have the most difficulty to fix the defects. Because they have the highest outgoing/ingoing degree of connection (both 5/1).
You can also use discovery plug-ins to use temporal logic to verify if the cases in a log satisfy certain properties. An example to this from the tutorial:
We know that after a try to fix the defect, the telephone should be tested to check if it is indeed repaired.
Thus, we could use the “LTL Checker” plug-in to verify the property: Does the task “Test Repair” always happen after the tasks “Repair (Simple)” and before the task “Archive Repair”?
And so ends the tutorial, which gave us a brief overview on how some discovery plug-ins can be used for mining knowledge related to processes.
Some Literature
Apart from reading the Process Mining Manifesto, which gives you a general introduction to process mining. I’ve also read “Process Mining for the multi-faceted analysis of business processes—A case study in a financial services organization“. As the title says its a case study, so I got to read on the impact of process mining on real organizations.
Aside from the case specific content, the journal/article also talks about broad subjects such as the link between process mining and business intelligence. Process mining can be seen as the link between Business Intelligence and Business Process Management (BPM). Process mining occurs during the diagnosis phase of BPM. Normally, Business Process Analysis (BPA) and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) are the techniques used on getting statistics on the business process, but process mining provides deeper insight, by going into the exact paths of execution. Process mining discovers, monitors and enhances processes by extracting knowledge from event logs.
From now on I will use this blog to also talk about my Master’s project. It’s a project which is necessary to complete my Master in Information Management, worth 15 ECTS out of the 60 for the whole Master. The Master’s thesis is then composed/written out of that project. I’ll try to update this blog as much as I can.
Process Mining
My project is about process mining. What exactly is process mining? Well, according to the process mining manifesto, it is:
a relatively young research discipline that sits between computational intelligence and data mining on the one hand, and process modeling and analysis on the other hand.
And the Idea of it is:
The idea of process mining is to discover, monitor and improve real processes (i.e., not assumed processes) by extracting knowledge from event logs readily available in today’s (information) systems.
So it’s about algorithms which are able to extract knowledge from event logs. More simple: process mining are techniques used in order to discover new processes, monitor existing processes and even improve processes.
We’re more accustomed to the idea of data mining, which is extracting knowledge from data warehouses. The focus was always on data until around the 90′s, when things like process re-engineering started emerging, processes started becoming important as well. Process mining is filling the gap between Business Intelligence and Business Process Management.
The tool
Today I was playing around with the tool used for process mining, called ProM. ProM gives you a framework where you can use process mining tools. I also followed an introductory tutorial for using the tool.
ProM enables you to use an event log in order to do various actions using plug-ins. These plug-ins can be categorized into three:
A cool example of the plug-ins that I used today is the alpha-algorithm. It mines a petri net out of the event log. I used the event log which is given in the tutorial, it’s about a process to repair telephones in a company.
In the image above you see the key data on the event log. 1 process, 1000 instances of that process, accumulating 10476 events, a mean of 10 events per instance.
In the image above you see the action tab of ProM, Inputted is the event log I used, then in Actions I searched for the alpha-algorithm, which was installed in a more general plug-in.
Above you see the result of the alpha algorithm. So it actually makes a process model out of the event log, very cool. More detailed: the alpha-algorithm mines the control flow perspective of a process. From the tutorial:
The control- flow perspective of a process establishes the dependencies among its tasks. Which tasks precede which other ones? Are there concurrent tasks? Are there loops? In short, what is the process model that summarizes the flow followed by most/all cases in the log? This information is important because it gives you feedback about how cases are actually being executed in the organization.
So with this model you can check whether in your company, the process is actually being done how you thought it was, or does the model show that things are done differently? So this plug-in falls under the first category, i.e. “Discovery”. It answers the question: How are the cases actually being executed?
So I was messing around with the minecraft character skin and decided to do a ninja skin. How it looks on an image editor:
And how it looks in the game:
If you want the skin, get it here
The Game
The app has been published! you can find it HERE or you can just search “Steel’s Run” in the Playstore (Developer: Sierens Apps). Would be nice to receive some feedback!
The free desktop version can be found HERE (left arrow to jump, right one to shoot).
Today
Before publishing the app, I designed the icon. Here’s how it looks:
I think it looks good enough, especially the background. The character could get better graphics but that would’ve taken hours and hours so i just enlarged the existing sprites. I could have also added the typical glow in the center of the icon but opted out from doing it.
Then I went on to create a feature graphic, which is just a rearrangement of the title. You can see it on the playstore.
After that I published my first real app! The challenge is done!
The Journey
It feels good to have achieved my goal. Looking back at my first post, I set out to develop and publish an app in 30 days, all the month of September. No more, no less, and I stuck to it. It doesn’t matter if my app doesn’t even get 50 downloads. What really matters to me is that I set an intrinsic goal and I achieved it. I started something and finished it. I created something instead of consuming. I feel really satisfied with all this.
Then there’s also everything I learned along the way. I developed a good base for programming in java, having had no experience with it before. I got introduced to XML and learned how to deal with it, and how it is a very powerful language for representing content. I got some experience with Eclipse, together with the Android SDK and the ADT. The combination of Eclipse and the ADT provide an amazing development environment experience. I can’t live without them anymore. Not to mention the awesome libgdx library for making games, which lets me easily create a desktop and android version of the game.
I will focus on getting my master’s degree now but that doesn’t mean I wont start new projects in the near future. I look forward to expanding Steel’s Run, adding new levels, new features,etc. Creating something has always felt amazing and I wont stop doing it.
The game is done. Get the desktop version HERE. The only keys to press are the left arrow key(touch left in android) and the right arrow key(touch right in android). I have done everything I wanted with it before I release it tomorrow. I still need to do the app icon design but I’ll do that tomorrow.
I did the title and credits, it’s the best I could do in 1 hour. OpenDyslexic is very pretty!
I also worked on transitioning from title to game. The first time you open the game, you get the title. If you die or win, you go back to the title, but only in the android version. I don’t know why in the desktop version the title gets skipped when you die or win and it jumps back right to the start of the game. It works fine when you open the game for the first time though. I’m happy all works well in Android.
I also added sound. Whenever there’s a collision there’s sound. I used Bfxr for it.
I’m happy with how the game is so far. It is very challenging, and yes, it can be finished. I have tested all sections of it and have been able to do them. I look forward to adding more levels when I have more time.
To remind you, the desktop version is free and the one I linked here at the beginning of the post will be the last one fro quite a while. The Android version will be paid, I’m thinking somewhere around 0.70 to 0.85 cents and will be available, hopefully, tomorrow or Monday.
