Comparing decision mining approaches with regard to the meaningfulness of their results

Decisions and the underlying rules are indispensable for driving process execution during runtime, i.e., for routing process instances at alternative branches based on the values of process data. Decision rules can comprise unary data conditions, e.g., age > 40, binary data conditions where the relation between two or more variables is relevant, e.g. temperature1 < temperature2, and more complex conditions that refer to, for example, parts of a medical image. Decision discovery aims at automatically deriving decision rules from process event logs. Existing approaches focus on the discovery of unary, or in some instances binary data conditions. The discovered decision rules are usually evaluated using accuracy, but not with regards to their semantics and meaningfulness, although this is crucial for validation and the subsequent implementation/adaptation of the decision rules. Hence, this paper compares three decision mining approaches, i.e., two existing ones and one newly described approach, with respect to the meaningfulness of their results. For comparison, we use one synthetic data set for a realistic manufacturing case and the two real-world BPIC 2017/2020 logs. The discovered rules are discussed with regards to their semantics and meaningfulness.