Fast incremental conformance analysis for interactive process discovery

Interactive process discovery allows users to specify domain knowledge while discovering process models with the help of event logs. Typically the coherence of an event log and a process model is calculated using conformance analysis. Many state-of-the-art conformance techniques emphasize on the correctness of the results, and hence can be slow, impractical and undesirable in interactive process discovery setting, especially when the process models are complex. In this paper, we present a framework (and its application) to calculate conformance fast enough to guide the user in interactive process discovery. The proposed framework exploits the underlying techniques used for interactive process discovery in order to incrementally update the conformance results. We trade the accuracy of conformance for performance. However, the user is also provided with some diagnostic information, which can be useful for decision making in an interactive process discovery setting. The results show that our approach can be considerably faster than the traditional approaches and hence better suited in an interactive setting.