Monotone Conformance Checking for Partially Matching Designed and Observed Processes

Conformance checking is a subarea of process mining that studies relations between designed processes, also called process models, and records of observed processes, also called event logs. In the last decade, research in conformance checking has proposed a plethora of techniques for characterizing the discrepancies between process models and event logs. Often, these techniques are also applied to measure the quality of process models automatically discovered from event logs. Recently, the process mining community has initiated a discussion on the desired properties of such measures. This discussion witnesses the lack of measures with the desired properties and the lack of properties intended for measures that support partially matching processes, i.e., processes that are not identical but differ in some steps. The paper at hand addresses these limitations. Firstly, it extends the recently introduced precision and recall conformance measures between process models and event logs that possess the desired property of monotonicity with the support of partially matching processes. Secondly, it introduces new intuitively desired properties of conformance measures that support partially matching processes and shows that our measures indeed possess them. The new measures have been implemented in a publicly available tool. The reported qualitative and quantitative evaluations based on our implementation demonstrate the feasibility of using the proposed measures in industrial settings.