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Trace Clustering

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Encyclopedia of Big Data Technologies

Synonyms

Clustering of process instances; Process variant discovery

Definition

Given an event log being a bag of process instances, with each process instance or trace consisting of a sequence of events, trace clustering refers to grouping these process instances so as to maximize the similarity between them and maximize the dissimilarity between the groups. While trace clustering might be described as discovering process variants, usually, the term process variant is already used for a collection of process instances with exactly the same event sequence. As such, trace clustering usually refers to the grouping of those variants into logically coherent groups, which can be, confusingly, referred to as variants of the process.

Overview

This entry discusses trace clustering in the context of process mining. The technique is explained in general, followed by a dense yet informative typology of techniques. This entry is concluded by an overview of related topics.

Introduction

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Jochen De Weerdt

Authors
  1. Jochen De Weerdt
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jochen De Weerdt .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Comp. Sci. and Engineering, University of New South Wales School of Comp. Sci. and Engineering, Eveleigh, New South Wales, Australia

    Sherif Sakr

  2. Sch of Info Techno, Building J12, University of Sydney Sch of Info Techno, Building J12, Sydney, Australia

    Albert Zomaya

Section Editor information

  1. Institute of Computer Science, University of Tartu, Juhan Liivi 2, 50409, Tartu, Estonia

    Marlon Dumas

  2. Department of Computer Science, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099, Berlin, Germany

    Matthias Weidlich

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De Weerdt, J. (2018). Trace Clustering. In: Sakr, S., Zomaya, A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Big Data Technologies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63962-8_91-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63962-8_91-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-63962-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-63962-8

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