Recognizing task-level events from user interaction data

Abstract

User interaction data comprises events that capture individual actions that a user performs on their computer. Such events provide detailed records about how users carry out their tasks in a process, even when this involves different applications. Although the comprehensiveness of such data provides a promising basis for process mining, user interaction events cannot be used directly for this purpose, because they do not meet two essential requirements. In particular, they neither indicate their relation to a process-level activity nor their relation to a specific process execution. Therefore, user interaction data needs to be transformed so that it meets these requirements before process mining techniques can be applied. This transformation problem comprises identifying tasks and their types and determining the relation between tasks and process executions. While some existing approaches tackle parts of this problem, none address it comprehensively. Therefore, we propose an unsupervised approach for recognizing task-level events from user interaction data that addresses it in full. It segments user interaction data to identify tasks, categorizes these according to their type, and relates tasks to each other via object instances it extracts from the user interaction events. In this manner, our approach creates task-level events that meet the requirements of process mining settings. Our evaluation demonstrates the approach’s efficacy and shows that its combined consideration of control-flow, data, and semantic information allows it to outperform baseline approaches in both online and offline settings.