Mining Explainable Predictive Features for Water Quality Management

Process mining is a family of techniques that support the analysis of operational processes, in terms of key performance indicators, using event data Van Der Aalst (2012). Process mining can be used in number of ways, such as in identifying insights into current processes or in identifying actions or places within workflows where interventions should be made to improve performance. Although processing mining is typically used in the context of commercial business environments, there is crossover to other areas where processes play an important role, such as in water quality management processes administered by local government authorities or citizen science projects that use the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) Higgins, Williams, Leibovici, Simonis, Davis, Muldoon, van Genuchten, O'Hare and Wiemann (2016). In the case of water quality management, traditional event log data from information technology systems is often lacking in that many tasks, such as the manual sampling of water and the microbial culturing by biologists and laboratory technicians to identify faecal coliforms, are not performed using computers and are not logged. Nevertheless, it is likely that techniques developed to aid explainability and in the evaluation of machine learning algorithms in such cases will prove using in traditional process mining systems where similar problems must be addressed. This paper focuses on mining suitable features to perform inference for the level of bacteria, and specifically Enterococci and Escherichia coli (E.