Semantics-aware mechanisms for control-flow anonymization in process mining

Information systems support the execution of business processes. As part of that, data about process execution is recorded in event logs, which can be used to analyse the control-flow of the respective processes. However, such data may contain personal information on process stakeholders that is protected by privacy regulations. Process analysis based on event logs shall, therefore, employ anonymization techniques. In this paper, we introduce two approaches to anonymize the recorded control-flow of a process. Specifically, we present SaCoFa and SaPa as two techniques to anonymize the result of trace-variant queries over an event log. Unlike existing techniques that achieve differential privacy through randomized noise insertion, our techniques rely on noise insertion mechanisms that incorporate a process' semantics, thereby avoiding easily-recognizable noise. Both techniques take different design choices, though. SaCoFa anonymizes a trace-variant distribution directly, thereby focusing on utility preservation at the expense of potentially changing the number of a traces in the result considerably. SaPa, in turn, anonymizes a trace-variant distribution indirectly, through play-out of an anonymized directly-follows distribution. This way, the number of traces in the result is close to the original log, but the drop in utility may become larger due to using only local control-flow information. However, our experiments demonstrate that both approaches strike a better balance of preserving the utility of an event log compared to existing techniques.(c) 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

Information systems support business process execution and data about process execution is recorded in event logs for analysis. To protect personal information, anonymization techniques should be used. This paper presents two approaches, SaCoFa and SaPa, for anonymizing the control-flow of a process.