2024/02/14 by Alessandro Niro, Michael Werner, Niro, Alessandro +1 · 1 citation
Business, Management and Accounting · Engineering · #Advanced Data Processing Techniques #Business Process Modeling and Analysis #Databases (cs.DB) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Economics and business #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Statistical Finance (q-fin.ST)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2403.00775
openalex publication_date 2024/02/14 · openalex created_date 2024/03/06 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Detecting anomalies is important for identifying inefficiencies, errors, or fraud in business processes. Traditional process mining approaches focus on analyzing 'flattened', sequential, event logs based on a single case notion. However, many real-world process executions exhibit a graph-like structure, where events can be associated with multiple cases. Flattening event logs requires selecting a single case identifier which creates a gap with the real event data and artificially introduces anomalies in the event logs. Object-centric process mining avoids these limitations by allowing events to be related to different cases. This study proposes a novel framework for anomaly detection in business processes that exploits graph neural networks and the enhanced information offered by object-centric process mining. We first reconstruct and represent the process dependencies of the object-centric event logs as attributed graphs and then employ a graph convolutional autoencoder architecture to detect anomalous events. Our results show that our approach provides promising performance in detecting anomalies at the activity type and attributes level, although it struggles to detect anomalies in the temporal order of events.