Evaluating Trace Encoding Methods in Process Mining

Encoding methods affect the performance of process mining tasks but little work in the literature focused on quantifying their impact. In this paper, we compare 10 different encoding methods from three different families (trace replay and alignment, graph embeddings, and word embeddings) using measures to evaluate the overlaps in the feature space, the accuracy obtained, and the computational resources (time) consumed with a classification task. Across hundreds of event logs representing four variations of five scenarios and five anomalies, it was possible to identify the edge2vec method as the most accurate and effective in reducing class overlapping in the feature space.