  Local Process Model (LPM) discovery is focused on the mining of a set of
process models where each model describes the behavior represented in the event
log only partially, i.e. subsets of possible events are taken into account to
create so-called local process models. Often such smaller models provide
valuable insights into the behavior of the process, especially when no adequate
and comprehensible single overall process model exists that is able to describe
the traces of the process from start to end. The practical application of LPM
discovery is however hindered by computational issues in the case of logs with
many activities (problems may already occur when there are more than 17 unique
activities). In this paper, we explore three heuristics to discover subsets of
activities that lead to useful log projections with the goal of speeding up LPM
discovery considerably while still finding high-quality LPMs. We found that a
Markov clustering approach to create projection sets results in the largest
improvement of execution time, with discovered LPMs still being better than
with the use of randomly generated activity sets of the same size. Another
heuristic, based on log entropy, yields a more moderate speedup, but enables
the discovery of higher quality LPMs. The third heuristic, based on the
relative information gain, shows unstable performance: for some data sets the
speedup and LPM quality are higher than with the log entropy based method,
while for other data sets there is no speedup at all.
