A Framework to Support the Validation of Process Mining Inquiries

In exploratory process mining, analysts often start with limited knowledge of the log. As they seek to improve their understanding of the log, they develop expectations about what the results might be. Based on these expectations, they then make inquiries and translate them into queries against the log. However, during the analysis, analysts need to evaluate and compare the results of their queries to be able to validate them against their expectations. In this paper, we propose a framework to support process analysts in validating their query results and to enable them to reflect on their analytical process. The framework helps analysts to record their queries and results and allows them to characterize and compare the results obtained with different queries, thereby facilitating the validation process. We implemented the framework as a Python library that can be easily extended and integrated into existing process mining environments. We also demonstrated the usefulness of the framework through an extensive analysis of a real event log.