Evaluation of Trace Alignment Quality and its Application in Medical Process Mining
  Trace alignment algorithms have been used in process mining for discovering
the consensus treatment procedures and process deviations. Different alignment
algorithms, however, may produce very different results. No widely-adopted
method exists for evaluating the results of trace alignment. Existing
reference-free evaluation methods cannot adequately and comprehensively assess
the alignment quality. We analyzed and compared the existing evaluation
methods, identifying their limitations, and introduced improvements in two
reference-free evaluation methods. Our approach assesses the alignment result
globally instead of locally, and therefore helps the algorithm to optimize
overall alignment quality. We also introduced a novel metric to measure the
alignment complexity, which can be used as a constraint on alignment algorithm
optimization. We tested our evaluation methods on a trauma resuscitation
dataset and provided the medical explanation of the activities and patterns
identified as deviations using our proposed evaluation methods.
