Visual Analytics Meets Process Mining: Challenges and Opportunities

Event data or traces of activities often exhibit unexpected behavior and complex relations. Thus, before and during the application of automated analysis methods, such as process mining algorithms, the analyst needs to investigate and understand the data at hand in order to decide which analysis methods might be appropriate. Visual analytics integrates the outstanding capabilities of humans in terms of visual information exploration with the enormous processing power of computers to form a powerful knowledge discovery environment. The combination of visual data exploration with process mining algorithms makes complex information structures more comprehensible and facilitates new insights. In this position paper I portray various concepts of interactive visual support for process mining, focusing on the challenges, but also the great opportunities for analyzing process data with visual analytics methods.