WAKE: A Weakly Supervised Business Process Anomaly Detection Framework via a Pre-Trained Autoencoder

Abstract

The ability to detect anomalies in business processes is crucial for achieving success in business operations. While unsupervised anomaly detection approaches have gained popularity in recent years due to their label-free nature, in some cases, a limited number of labelled anomalies can be provided and using them can improve the performance of anomaly detection. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework for anomaly detection that uses a pre-trained autoencoder to extract feature representations of traces. An anomaly score generator based on a multi-layer perceptron is utilized to evaluate the extracted features. The entire framework is trained using a joint loss that ensures the generated anomaly scores satisfy a specific distribution without compromising the autoencoder's ability to reconstruct normal traces. The feature encoder is fine-tuned to provide insights into the cause of anomalies. Additionally, we design a novel technique for calculating anomaly scores to mitigate the effects of varying numbers of potential attribute values. We conduct extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-life logs, and our results demonstrate that our proposed method, WAKE, outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised deep business process anomaly detection methods by a significant margin. Additionally, it outperforms other weakly supervised anomaly detection methods as well

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