Structural and Behavioral Biases in Process Comparison Using Models and Logs

Process models automatically discovered from event logs represent business process behavior in a compact graphical way. To compare process variants, e.g., to explore how the system's behavior changes over time or between customer segments, analysts tend to visually compare conceptual process models discovered from different "slices" of the event log, solely relying on the structure of these models. However, the structural distance between two process models does not always reflect the behavioral distance between the underlying event logs and thus structural comparison should be applied with care. This paper aims to investigate relations between structural and behavioral process distances and explain when structural distance between two discovered process models can be used to assess the behavioral distance between the corresponding event logs.