The α-algorithm or α-miner is an algorithm used in process mining, aimed at reconstructing causality from a set of sequences of events.
It was first put forward by van der Aalst, Weijters and Măruşter.
Event log is the primary requirement for applying any process discovery algorithm.
An event log consists of a unique identifier for a case, activity name describing the action occurring in the process and timestamp.
For the sake of simplicity the following example would use alphabetic letter to represent an activity.
Consider an example event log shown in the following figure: An event log is a multi set of traces, and a trace is a sequence of activities.
According to the rules of alpha miner, activities belonging to various cases can have 4 types of relationships between them:[2] Sequence Pattern: A → B XOR-split Pattern: A → B, A → C, and B # C AND-split Pattern: A → B, A → C, and B || C The alpha miner starts with converting an event log into directly-follows, sequence, parallel, and choice relations, and using them to create a petri net describing the process model.
Using the footprint matrix and the above shown pattern, one can construct a process model.
It is not required that all possible traces be present (which would be countably infinite for a net with a loop).