Fusion Miner: Process discovery for mixed-paradigm models

•The first approach to offer a way to analyze process-oriented data in a mixed-paradigm fashion, i.e., one that mixes declarative and procedural models in a single state space. The outcome yields fit and precise process models that better support practitioners in judging the quality of their as-is business processes.•An overview of how mixed-paradigm process models with intertwined state spaces can improve over single-paradigm approaches.•A preliminary approach towards conformance checking of mixed-paradigm models.•Three elaborate examples which explain how mixed-paradigm models can excel at capturing logs with different layers of flexibility.

The research area of business process mining has vastly matured in recent years. Its main focus centers around the extraction and analysis of process models from event logs. A strong emphasis lies on the automatic discovery of models for which numerous algorithms have been proposed already. So far, most discovery algorithms were limited to the derivation of single-paradigm models, which contain either procedural or declarative constructs, targeting the mining of strict and flexible processes respectively. This paper proposes the first fully-automated mining technique to discover procedural workflows combined with Declare templates to capture processes that are difficult to mine with only a single paradigm, e.g., workflows with different layers of flexibility.This approach provides process analysts with new discovery capabilities, including the retrieval of better fitting and more precise models with high comprehensibility. The main contribution consists of the Fusion Miner algorithm, which has been implemented in the process mining framework ProM as a plug-in.