# Causal Process Mining from Relational Databases with Domain Knowledge

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.08314 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08314/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 16 Feb 2022.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Defining Cases and Variants for Object-Centric Event Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03235/) (2022)
- [The WHY in Business Processes: Discovery of Causal Execution Dependencies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14975/) (2023)
- [A Framework for Extracting and Encoding Features from Object-Centric Event Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01219/) (2022)
- [Clustering Object-Centric Event Logs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12764/) (2022)
- [A Monitoring and Discovery Approach for Declarative Processes Based on Streams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05364/) (2022)
- [From Event Logs to Governed Action: A BlueSky Agenda for Agentic Process Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07984/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The plethora of algorithms in the research field of process mining builds on directly-follows relations. Even though various improvements have been made in the last decade, there are serious weaknesses of these relationships. Once events associated with different objects that relate with a cardinality of 1:N and N:M to each other, techniques based on directly-follows relations produce spurious relations, self-loops, and back-jumps. This is due to the fact that event sequence as described in classical event logs differs from event causation. In this paper, we address the research problem of representing the causal structure of process-related event data. To this end, we develop a new approach called Causal Process Mining. This approach renounces the use of flat event logs and considers relational databases of event data as an input. More specifically, we transform the relational data structures based on the Causal Process Template into what we call Causal Event Graph. We evaluate our approach and compare its outputs with techniques based on directly-follows relations in a case study with an European food production company. Our results demonstrate the benefits for enriching process mining with additional knowledge from the domain.