Jessica Van Suetendael - Behavioral Analytics: What does that even mean?

Behavior is a foundational yet often implicitly defined concept in process mining. Although techniques such as process discovery, conformance checking, and performance analysis are fundamentally grounded in behavioral aspects of event data, the notion of “behavior” is frequently used without explicit conceptualization. This lack of clarity can hinder methodological consistency, complicate comparisons across studies, and obscure the assumptions underlying analytical approaches. This paper investigates how behavior and behavioral analytics are understood in process mining literature, focusing on contributions from the Event Data and Behavioral Analytics workshop at the International Conference on Process Mining. Through a qualitative analysis of workshop publications, we uncover implicit definitions and interpretations of behavior and behavioral analytics, identifying nine major themes that play an important role. Rather than prescribing a universal definition, this work provides an intermediary step toward clarifying the conceptual boundaries of behavior, with the aim of fostering discussion, making assumptions explicit, and identifying directions for future theory-building. Ultimately, this exploratory mapping supports more coherent methodologies and lays the groundwork for cumulative knowledge building in the field.

Jessica Van Suetendael started her PhD almost two years ago and has produced her first research outputs focusing on documenting the behaviors of process mining analysts during exploratory process mining. Her vocabulary of behaviors (or ethogram) has been presented at ICPM 2024, and a validated version of the ethogram was published in Process Science.

Besides her research, she is an active member of the Business Informatics Community called Enigma. Furthermore, she is responsible for organizing seminars for both the Business Informatics research group and for AI4Business.