With the hype around the term ‘Big Data’, Data Mining is now seen as a powerful technology with great potential to be used in many areas. Though the term ‘Data Mining’ is relatively new; but the technology is not. Technically, Data Mining is an analytic process designed to explore large amounts of business or market related data, often referred as ‘Big Data’. However, the ultimate goal of Data Mining is prediction.
In the recent few years, the extensive use of Data Mining techniques has led to the requirement of Data Scientists, who are expected to turn data into value. In fact, there are different data sources meant for different purposes.
- Report: What happened?
- Diagnose: Why it happened?
- Predict: What will happen?
- Recommend: What best can happen?
So, in order to improve any business process, you need to understand these four key questions. The techniques that you apply to analyze of your business processes, helps you discover, monitor, and enhance real processes. In today’s IT world, Data Mining techniques allow you to extract knowledge from the available data and improve your business processes, rather than just analyze the data.
To start with the process mining, you need to log an event, which is considered the starting point for any process. Here, each logged event is considered an activity. Activity is generally few defined steps related to a specific case, known as process instance. A case contains several events, and when ordered, it represents one process run. Moreover, other information stored by event logs includes the resource starting the activity, the event timestamp, or the other recorded data elements.
Thus, with process mining you can reduce the gap between the conventional process analysis methods, the data-centric techniques for analysis, and data mining. In other words, process mining compares the behavior of observed data and process models.
Process mining is classified under three categories, as mentioned below.
Discovery: In the discovery technique, a process model is produced based on the event log. However, it doesn’t use any earlier information.
Agreement: An event log is compared with its existing process model.
Enhancement: Using the recorded process in the event log, the existing process model is improved or extended.
However, the most important application of process mining techniques is in online setting, better known as operational support. These techniques are applied in various business sectors, whether private or public.
By this new way of looking at your business processes, you can help the business deliver valuable insights, especially when the business is struggling for effectiveness and quality.