Predictive process monitoring is concerned with the analysis of events produced during the execution of a business process in order to predict as early as possible the final outcome of an ongoing case. Traditionally, predictive process monitoring methods are optimized with respect to accuracy. However, in environments where users make decisions and take actions in response to the predictions they receive, it is equally important to optimize the stability of the successive predictions made for each case. To this end, this paper defines a notion of temporal stability for binary classification tasks in predictive process monitoring and evaluates existing methods with respect to both temporal stability and accuracy. We find that methods based on XGBoost and LSTM neural networks exhibit the highest temporal stability. We then show that temporal stability can be enhanced by hyperparameter-optimizing random forests and XGBoost classifiers with respect to inter-run stability. Finally, we show that time series smoothing techniques can further enhance temporal stability at the expense of slightly lower accuracy.
Predictive business process monitoring methods exploit logs of completed cases of a process in order to make predictions about running cases thereof. Existing methods in this space are tailor-made for specific prediction tasks. Moreover, their relative accuracy is highly sensitive to the dataset at hand, thus requiring users to engage in trial-and-error and tuning when applying them in a specific setting. This paper investigates Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks as an approach to build consistently accurate models for a wide range of predictive process monitoring tasks. First, we show that LSTMs outperform existing techniques to predict the next event of a running case and its timestamp. Next, we show how to use models for predicting the next task in order to predict the full continuation of a running case. Finally, we apply the same approach to predict the remaining time, and show that this approach outperforms existing tailor-made methods. The goal of our work is to examine the utility of predictive analytics for case-oriented semi-structured business processes. As a first step towards this goal, this paper describes an approach to leverage case history to predict outcomes at decision points in case-oriented semi-structured processes, and examine how the contents of documents at these decision points influence their outcomes. We apply an ant-colony optimization (ACO) based algorithm to create a probabilistic activity graph from traces, and use it to identify key decision points in a given process. For each activity node that represents a decision point in the mined probabilistic graph, the likelihood of different outcomes from the node can be correlated with the contents of documents accessed by the activity node. This is achieved by using a standard decision tree learning algorithm. We validate our approach on correlated case instance traces generated by a simulator that we constructed to implement non-deterministic executions of an automobile insurance claims scenario. In practice we find that our approach can lead to useful predictions at different stages of execution in a semi-structured case oriented process. Process mining can be viewed as the missing link between model-based process analysis and data-oriented analysis techniques. Lion's share of process mining research has been focusing on process discovery (creating process models from raw data) and replay techniques to check conformance and analyze bottlenecks. These techniques have helped organizations to address compliance and performance problems. However, for a more refined analysis, it is essential to correlate different process characteristics. For example, do deviations from the normative process cause additional delays and costs? Are rejected cases handled differently in the initial phases of the process? What is the influence of a doctor's experience on treatment process? These and other questions may involve process characteristics related to different perspectives (control-flow, data-flow, time, organization, cost, compliance, etc.). Specific questions (e.g., predicting the remaining processing time) have been investigated before, but a generic approach was missing thus far. The proposed framework unifies a number of approaches for correlation analysis proposed in literature, proposing a general solution that can perform those analyses and many more. The approach has been implemented in ProM and combines process and data mining techniques. In this paper, we also demonstrate the applicability using a case study conducted with the UWV (Employee Insurance Agency), one of the largest "administrative factories" in The Netherlands. The enactment of business processes is generally supported by information systems that record data about each process execution (a.k.a. case). This data can be analyzed via a family of methods broadly known as process mining. Predictive process monitoring is a process mining technique concerned with predicting how running (uncompleted) cases will unfold up to their completion. In this paper, we propose a predictive process monitoring framework for estimating the probability that a given predicate will be fulfilled upon completion of a running case. The framework takes into account both the sequence of events observed in the current trace, as well as data attributes associated to these events. The prediction problem is approached in two phases. First, prefixes of previous (completed) cases are clustered according to control flow information. Secondly, a classifier is built for each cluster using event data attributes to discriminate between cases that lead to a fulfillment of the predicate under examination and cases that lead to a violation within the cluster. At runtime, a prediction is made on a running case by mapping it to a cluster and applying the corresponding classifier. The framework has been implemented in the ProM toolset and validated on a log pertaining to the treatment of cancer patients in a large hospital. Abstract Predicting business process behaviour is an important aspect of business process management. Motivated by research in natural language processing, this paper describes an application of deep learning with recurrent neural networks to the problem of predicting the next event in a business process. This is both a novel method in process prediction, which has largely relied on explicit process models, and also a novel application of deep learning methods. The approach is evaluated on two real datasets and our results surpass the state-of-the-art in prediction precision. This paper addresses the problem of predicting the outcome of an ongoing case of a business process based on event logs. In this setting, the outcome of a case may refer for example to the achievement of a performance objective or the fulfillment of a compliance rule upon completion of the case. Given a log consisting of traces of completed cases, given a trace of an ongoing case, and given two or more possible outcomes e.g., a positive and a negative outcome, the paper addresses the problem of determining the most likely outcome for the case in question. Previous approaches to this problem are largely based on simple symbolic sequence classification, meaning that they extract features from traces seen as sequences of event labels, and use these features to construct a classifier for runtime prediction. In doing so, these approaches ignore the data payload associated to each event. This paper approaches the problem from a different angle by treating traces as complex symbolic sequences, that is, sequences of events each carrying a data payload. In this context, the paper outlines different feature encodings of complex symbolic sequences and compares their predictive accuracy on real-life business process event logs.