On the Definition of Role Mining 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.