Abstract: On the Definition of Role Mining Mario Frank and Joachim M. Buhmann and David Basin There have been many approaches proposed for role mining. However, the problems solved often differ due to a lack of consensus on the formal definition of the role mining problem. In this paper, we provide a detailed analysis of the requirements for role mining, the existing definitions of role mining, and the methods used to assess role mining results.Given basic assumptions on how access-control configurations are generated, we propose a novel definition of the role mining problem that fulfills the requirements that real-world enterprises typically have. In this way, we recast role mining as a prediction problem.