Dotted chart
A dotted chart is a process-mining visualisation that plots every event in a log as a dot on a 2D grid — typically time on one axis and cases on the other, with dot colour or size encoding activity type. The chart reveals temporal patterns (seasonality, surges, gaps) and case-level anomalies that summary statistics hide.
Dotted charts are the most-underrated process-mining visualisation. A summary histogram says 'average cycle time is 4 days'; a dotted chart shows that cycle time is 1 day for 60% of cases, 12 days for 30%, and 60 days for the long tail. The visualisation makes obvious what aggregates obscure: bimodal distributions, day-of-week effects, the time when a process broke and was fixed, the customer segments that follow different paths. Dotted charts are the right starting point for any process exploration — discover what's hiding before running formal analysis.
Related terms
- Variant analysis
Variant analysis groups cases by the unique sequence of activities they followed and ranks variants by frequency and cost.
- Process discovery
Process discovery is the process-mining technique of constructing a process model (typically BPMN or a Petri net) from an event log without prior knowledge of the intended process.
- Event log
An event log is the chronological record of activities executed in a process, structured so each row represents one event (case ID, activity name, timestamp, optional resource).