Using ProM lite

Hi, and welcome back to this course, Process Mining with ProM. Today I will show you how to use the process mining tool ProM Lite. If you did not install ProM Lite yet, then please look at the corresponding lecture, as I will assume that you have installed ProM Lite already. So let’s switch over to the tool and see how it works. So when you open ProM, this is the view you have. And there are three main aspects in ProM. So this is the Object view, the Action view, and the Visualization view. Another important button is the Import button. So let’s click the Import button.

And with this course comes a set of event logs, and let’s, for instance, import the loan process. You click Open, you get a dialog. What to pick here, I will explain in the next lecture, but the naive one is usually the best option. So now you have one object in your Object list, and here on the right, you see the name, the type, and when it was created, and how it was created. You can also unfavorite it, and then it is removed from the Favorite list and appears here in the All list. You can also visualize this object, perform an action, or use the resource or delete it.

You can also show the resources used to create this resource or that were created from this resource. We can rename it, and we can export it back to disk. So let’s click the Eye icon. So let’s visualize this resource. This is an example of one event log visualizer that will be explained in more detail in a later lecture, but it’s important to see that the visualization is the central part. And here on the top right, you, again, have some controls. So here you have a drop-down list of all the visualizers you can pick. So the same object can be visualized in this example by three different visualizers. Using this button, you can refresh the view.

You can try to print it. Here, you can also mark the object to the event log as favorite or not. You can perform other actions. You can view the resource in the workspace, or you can view an overview of all the visualizations that were created. And by clicking the Eye icon, you go back. So when we click this, we go back to the overview. And when we press the Play button, we go to the Central and the Middle view, which is the Action view, which actually allows you to take an object, or several objects, as input and create one or more objects as output. So as an example, let’s apply the Alpha miner on this input.

So here you can search for Alpha, and then you can select the Alpha miner, and you can start it. You can already see that it will produce a Petri net and a marking. And here on the bottom, you see some information about the author and a brief explanation.

When you remove your search query, you get the full list of algorithms that you can apply. So the green ones, you can apply because they have enough input. The yellow ones require some additional input that you can create using other plugins. There’s also several ways of filtering so you can only show the discovery plugins or only the conformance checking plugins, enhancement plugins, filtering plugins, or analytic plugins. There are also two types of plugins– one that require interaction from you, so you have Wizard screens where you can change settings, or that are run automatically without settings. That’s also indicated with this icon. It also first shows the ones that require interaction, and here are the ones that produce an immediate result.

But as I said, let’s start the Alpha miner. And when you press Start, you get a dialog with several options, and you can click Next, Next until you get the Finish button, and then it will run. And it will produce a new output. So we will explain the process model notation later. But when you click this button, you go back to the Object view, and you see that you actually created a Petri net next to your event log. You can rename this, for instance, “loan using Alpha.” Now the object was renamed, and you can also export this to disk, loan using Alpha.

And now you have a Petri net file on disk that you can use in other tools or later on for further analysis. Let’s clean the workspace. And that’s the basic usage of ProM. So now I hope you have a good understanding of the basic interface of the process mining tool ProM. And in the next lectures, we will dive deeper into particular analysis techniques and how to interpret the results. So I hope to see you again at the next lecture.