  Adapted from biological sequence alignment, trace alignment is a process
mining technique used to visualize and analyze workflow data. Any analysis done
with this method, however, is affected by the alignment quality. The best
existing trace alignment techniques use progressive guide-trees to
heuristically approximate the optimal alignment in O(N2L2) time. These
algorithms are heavily dependent on the selected guide-tree metric, often
return sum-of-pairs-score-reducing errors that interfere with interpretation,
and are computationally intensive for large datasets. To alleviate these
issues, we propose process-oriented iterative multiple alignment (PIMA), which
contains specialized optimizations to better handle workflow data. We
demonstrate that PIMA is a flexible framework capable of achieving better
sum-of-pairs score than existing trace alignment algorithms in only O(NL2)
time. We applied PIMA to analyzing medical workflow data, showing how iterative
alignment can better represent the data and facilitate the extraction of
insights from data visualization.
