Welcome

I have been working to grow my knowledge and skills around process mining and in an effort to not only work to better capture what I am learn but also build out a place to help others: I am going to be documenting and building out examples in the subsequent pages of this book. My aim is that this can become a useful resource for not only useful me but also future team members as we work to make sense of the processes around us.

  • I will try to reduce the use of overly technical terminology without also providing application focused translations. I expect that this will probably end up helping my significantly because I don’t want this to be an activity in rote memorization.
  • I want to better be able to interact with experts within the fields as questions arise, so I will work to capture specific terms. But I will also work on building out a glossary to consolidate those terms in a single location.
  • I often find that I learn best when I have a concrete example that I can use to ground myself. I will work to make sure the data I use is readily available/recreateble (also will be good for me in better learning to create reprex).
  • There are many different tools available when performing process mining analyses, but the one we will largely focus on one which exists within the R ecosystem. It is called bupaR (Business Process Analysis in R) and the documentation site for that package and the rest of the ‘-verse’ can be found at http://bupar.net/
    • Some of the other tools are mentioned in the literature section.

Disclaimers

I am not a process mining expert nor a researcher. In fact, I am still very new as a user of process mining methodologies. I do find this material to be useful and fun and on top of that I am always looking to grow and learn new things so I expect this book to grow with my understanding.

I cannot certify that the entirety of the content contained here will be accurate, but I will make every effort to keep this as updated as possible and will look to cite my sources as I use them.

What this book is

This book is an attempt to provide a useful synthesis of both the theoretical and practical usages of process mining in the R ecosystem.

I will aim to use examples as much as possible to show how an idea could be applied (and to help myself practice as well).

What this book is not

I will not be able to capture the entire field of process mining nor every use.

I also do not intend on providing more explanations around other R packages I will be using throughout the book. That likely includes a fair amount of data cleaning or aggregation that is done utilizing the packages within the tidyverse.

Contact

Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or have found any errors (grammatical or theoretical). I am planning on trying to keep this as up to date as possible and would love to hear from you. My contact information can be found at the top right of the document and I can be reached via twitter or linkedin.

Best,

-phil