Predictive process monitoring aims to predict future characteristics of an ongoing process case, such as case outcome or remaining timestamp. Recently, several predictive process monitoring methods based on deep learning such as Long Short-Term Memory or Convolutional Neural Network have been proposed to address the problem of next event prediction. However, due to insufficient training data or sub-optimal network configuration and architecture, these approaches do not generalize well the problem at hand. This paper proposes a novel adversarial training framework to address this shortcoming, based on an adaptation of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to the realm of sequential temporal data. The training works by putting one neural network against the other in a two-player game (hence the adversarial nature) which leads to predictions that are indistinguishable from the ground truth. We formally show that the worst-case accuracy of the proposed approach is at least equal to the accuracy achieved in non-adversarial settings. From the experimental evaluation it emerges that the approach systematically outperforms all baselines both in terms of accuracy and earliness of the prediction, despite using a simple network architecture and a naive feature encoding. Moreover, the approach is more robust, as its accuracy is not affected by fluctuations over the case length.
This paper proposes an encoder-decoder architecture grounded on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), that generates a sequence of activities and their timestamps in an end-to-end way. GANs work well with differentiable data such as images. However, a suffix is a sequence of categorical items. To this end, we use the Gumbel-Softmax distribution to get a differentiable continuous approximation. The training works by putting one neural network against the other in a two-player game (hence the "adversarial" nature), which leads to generating suffixes close to the ground truth. From the experime…
myInvenio（myInvenio 公司）；University of Padua（帕多瓦大学）；Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚理工大学）
Predictive Business Process Monitoring is becoming an essential aid for organizations, providing online operational support of their processes. This paper tackles the fundamental problem of equipping predictive business process monitoring with explanation capabilities, so that not only the what but also the why is reported when predicting generic KPIs like remaining time, or activity execution. We use the game theory of Shapley Values to obtain robust explanations of the predictions. The approach has been implemented and tested on real-life benchmarks, showing for the first time how explanatio…
The automation and digitalization of business processes has resulted in large amounts of data captured in information systems, which can aid businesses in understanding their processes better, improve workflows, or provide operational support. By making predictions about ongoing processes, bottlenecks can be identified and resources reallocated, as well as insights gained into the state of a process instance (case). Traditionally, data is extracted from systems in the form of an event log with a single identifying case notion, such as an order id for an Order to Cash (O2C) process. However, re…
Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) is an energy efficiency technique to track electricity consumption of an individual appliance in a household by one aggregated single, such as building level meter readings. The goal of NILM is to disaggregate the appliance from the aggregated singles by computational method. In this work, deep learning approaches are implemented to operate the desegregations. Deep neural networks, convolutional neural networks, and recurrent neural networks are employed for this operation. Additionally, sparse evolutionary training is applied to accelerate training efficie…
Universidade de Santiago de Compostela（圣地亚哥-德孔波斯特拉大学）
Predictive monitoring of business processes is concerned with the prediction of ongoing cases on a business process. Lately, the popularity of deep learning techniques has propitiated an ever-growing set of approaches focused on predictive monitoring based on these techniques. However, the high disparity of process logs and experimental setups used to evaluate these approaches makes it especially difficult to make a fair comparison. Furthermore, it also difficults the selection of the most suitable approach to solve a specific problem. In this paper, we provide both a systematic literature rev…
Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）；University of Tartu（塔尔图大学）；University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）
Predictive business process monitoring methods exploit historical process execution logs to generate predictions about running instances (called cases) of a business process, such as the prediction of the outcome, next activity or remaining cycle time of a given process case. These insights could be used to support operational managers in taking remedial actions as business processes unfold, e.g. shifting resources from one case onto another to ensure this latter is completed on time. A number of methods to tackle the remaining cycle time prediction problem have been proposed in the literature…
paluno - The Ruhr Institute for Software Technology（帕鲁诺——鲁尔软件技术研究所）
Predictive business process monitoring increasingly leverages sophisticated prediction models. Although sophisticated models achieve consistently higher prediction accuracy than simple models, one major drawback is their lack of interpretability, which limits their adoption in practice. We thus see growing interest in explainable predictive business process monitoring, which aims to increase the interpretability of prediction models. Existing solutions focus on giving factual explanations.While factual explanations can be helpful, humans typically do not ask why a particular prediction was mad…
Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）；University of Tartu（塔尔图大学）
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 s…
Process models are used by human analysts to model and analyse behaviour, and by machines to verify properties such as soundness, liveness or other reachability properties, and to compare their expressed behaviour with recorded behaviour within business processes of organisations. For both human and machine use, small models are preferable over large and complex models: for ease of human understanding and to reduce the time spent by machines in state space explorations. Reduction rules that preserve the behaviour of models have been defined for Petri nets, however in this paper we show that a …
The real-time prediction of business processes using historical event data is an important capability of modern business process monitoring systems. Existing process prediction methods are able to also exploit the data perspective of recorded events, in addition to the control-flow perspective. However, while well-structured numerical or categorical attributes are considered in many prediction techniques, almost no technique is able to utilize text documents written in natural language, which can hold information critical to the prediction task. In this paper, we illustrate the design, impleme…
Self-Explaining Neural Networks for Business Process Monitoring
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Hebrew University of Jerusalem（希伯来大学计算机科学与工程学院）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）；University of Piraeus（比雷埃夫斯大学）；Bar-Ilan University（巴伊兰大学）
Prescriptive process monitoring methods seek to improve the performance of a process by selectively triggering interventions at runtime (e.g., offering a discount to a customer) to increase the probability of a desired case outcome (e.g., a customer making a purchase). The backbone of a prescriptive process monitoring method is an intervention policy, which determines for which cases and when an intervention should be executed. Existing methods in this field rely on predictive models to define intervention policies; specifically, they consider policies that trigger an intervention when the est…
Predictive business process monitoring (PBPM) aims to predict future process behavior during ongoing process executions based on event log data. Especially, techniques for the next activity and timestamp prediction can help to improve the performance of operational business processes. Recently, many PBPM solutions based on deep learning were proposed by researchers. Due to the sequential nature of event log data, a common choice is to apply recurrent neural networks with long short-term memory (LSTM) cells. We argue, that the elapsed time between events is informative. However, current PBPM te…
Predictive business process monitoring focuses on predicting future characteristics of a running process using event logs. The foresight into process execution promises great potentials for efficient operations, better resource management, and effective customer services. Deep learning-based approaches have been widely adopted in process mining to address the limitations of classical algorithms for solving multiple problems, especially the next event and remaining-time prediction tasks. Nevertheless, designing a deep neural architecture that performs competitively across various tasks is chall…
Time-Aware and Transition-Semantic Graph Neural Networks for Interpretable Predictive Business Process Monitoring
College of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, Khalifa University（卡利法大学计算与数学科学学院）；Department of Computer Science, Università degli Studi di Milano（米兰大学计算机科学系）
An Innovative Next Activity Prediction Using Process Entropy and Dynamic Attribute-Wise-Transformer in Predictive Business Process Monitoring
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science, University of Victoria（维多利亚大学工程与计算机科学学院电气与计算机工程系）；Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science, University of Victoria（维多利亚大学工程与计算机科学学院机械工程系）
Gamers Private Network (GPN) is a client/server technology that guarantees a connection for online video games that is more reliable and lower latency than a standard internet connection. Users of the GPN technology benefit from a stable and high-quality gaming experience for online games, which are hosted and played across the world. After transforming a massive volume of raw networking data collected by WTFast, we have structured the cleaned data into a special-purpose data warehouse and completed the extensive analysis using machine learning and neural nets technologies, and business intell…
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）；MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（麻省理工学院-IBM沃森人工智能实验室）
In networks of independent entities that face similar predictive tasks, transfer machine learning enables to re-use and improve neural nets using distributed data sets without the exposure of raw data. As the number of data sets in business networks grows and not every neural net transfer is successful, indicators are needed for its impact on the target performance-its transferability. We perform an empirical study on a unique real-world use case comprised of sales data from six different restaurants. We train and transfer neural nets across these restaurant sales data and measure their transf…
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心）；Saarland University（萨尔大学）
The contemporary process-aware information systems possess the capabilities to record the activities generated during the process execution. To leverage these process specific fine-granular data, process mining has recently emerged as a promising research discipline. As an important branch of process mining, predictive business process management, pursues the objective to generate forward-looking, predictive insights to shape business processes. In this study, we propose a conceptual framework sought to establish and promote understanding of decision-making environment, underlying business pro…
University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；University of Tartu（塔尔图大学）；DeepMind（深度思维）
Increasing the success rate of a process, i.e. the percentage of cases that end in a positive outcome, is a recurrent process improvement goal. At runtime, there are often certain actions (a.k.a. treatments) that workers may execute to lift the probability that a case ends in a positive outcome. For example, in a loan origination process, a possible treatment is to issue multiple loan offers to increase the probability that the customer takes a loan. Each treatment has a cost. Thus, when defining policies for prescribing treatments to cases, managers need to consider the net gain of the treatm…
Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH)（浦项科技大学）；Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST)（蔚山科学技术院）
There is a growing need for empirical benchmarks that support researchers and practitioners in selecting the best machine learning technique for given prediction tasks. In this paper, we consider the next event prediction task in business process predictive monitoring and we extend our previously published benchmark by studying the impact on the performance of different encoding windows and of using ensemble schemes. The choice of whether to use ensembles and which scheme to use often depends on the type of data and classification task. While there is a general understanding that ensembles per…
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 ta…
From Source to Target: Leveraging Transfer Learning for Predictive Process Monitoring in Organizations
Chair of Digital Industrial Service Systems, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg（数字工业服务系统教授，弗赖堡-亚历山大大学埃尔兰根-纽伦堡）；Professorship for Business Analytics, Technische Hochschule Nürnberg Georg Simon Ohm（商业分析教授，技术学院纽伦堡乔治·西蒙·奥姆）
本文提出基于迁移学习的预测性流程监控方法，通过在组织内和跨组织场景迁移预训练模型等资源，解决目标组织事件数据不足的问题，并在 IT 服务管理流程实验中验证其有效性。
Centro Singular de Investigación en Tecnoloxías Intelixentes (CiTIUS), Universidade de Santiago de Compostela（圣地亚哥-德孔波斯特拉大学智能技术研究中心（CiTIUS））；Universidade de Santiago de Compostela（圣地亚哥-德孔波斯特拉大学）；Departamento de Electrónica e Computación, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela（圣地亚哥-德孔波斯特拉大学电子与计算系）
Predictive monitoring of business processes is a subfield of process mining that aims to predict, among other things, the characteristics of the next event or the sequence of next events. Although multiple approaches based on deep learning have been proposed, mainly recurrent neural networks and convolutional neural networks, none of them really exploit the structural information available in process models. This paper proposes an approach based on graph convolutional networks and recurrent neural networks that uses information directly from the process model. An experimental evaluation on rea…
University of Tartu（塔尔图大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
Prescriptive process monitoring methods seek to optimize a business process by recommending interventions at runtime to prevent negative outcomes or poorly performing cases. In recent years, various prescriptive process monitoring methods have been proposed. This paper studies existing methods in this field via a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). In order to structure the field, the paper proposes a framework for characterizing prescriptive process monitoring methods according to their performance objective, performance metrics, intervention types, modeling techniques, data inputs, and inter…
Ulm University（乌尔姆大学）；Mansoura University（曼苏拉大学）；German University in Cairo（开罗德国大学）
Predictive business process monitoring (PPM) has been around for several years as a use case of process mining. PPM enables foreseeing the future of a business process through predicting relevant information about how a running process instance might end, related performance indicators, and other predictable aspects. A big share of PPM approaches adopts a Machine Learning (ML) technique to address a prediction task, especially non-process-aware PPM approaches. Consequently, PPM inherits the challenges faced by ML approaches. One of these challenges concerns the need to gain user trust in the p…
Institute for Databases and Information Systems, Ulm University（乌尔姆大学数据库与信息系统研究所）；Faculty of Computers and Information, Mansoura University（曼苏拉大学计算机与信息学院）；Faculty of Media Engineering and Technology, German University in Cairo（开罗德国大学媒体工程与技术学院）
Business processes evolve over time to adapt to changing business environments. This requires continuous monitoring of business processes to gain insights into whether they conform to the intended design or deviate from it. The situation when a business process changes while being analysed is denoted as Concept Drift. Its analysis is concerned with studying how a business process changes, in terms of detecting and localising changes and studying the effects of the latter. Concept drift analysis is crucial to enable early detection and management of changes, that is, whether to promote a change…
Ulm University（乌尔姆大学）；Mansoura University（曼苏拉大学）；German University in Cairo（开罗德国大学）
Predictive Process Monitoring (PPM) has been integrated into process mining tools as a value-adding task. PPM provides useful predictions on the further execution of the running business processes. To this end, machine learning-based techniques are widely employed in the context of PPM. In order to gain stakeholders trust and advocacy of PPM predictions, eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods are employed in order to compensate for the lack of transparency of most efficient predictive models. Even when employed under the same settings regarding data, preprocessing techniques, and ML…
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin（柏林洪堡大学）；University of Tartu（塔尔图大学）；TU Eindhoven（埃因霍温理工大学）；University of Padua（帕多瓦大学）；Free University of Bozen-Bolzano（博尔扎诺自由大学）
Predictive process monitoring is a family of techniques to analyze events produced during the execution of a business process in order to predict the future state or the final outcome of running process instances. Existing techniques in this field are able to predict, at each step of a process instance, the likelihood that it will lead to an undesired outcome.These techniques, however, focus on generating predictions and do not prescribe when and how process workers should intervene to decrease the cost of undesired outcomes. This paper proposes a framework for prescriptive process monitoring,…
Research Centre for Information Systems Engineering (LIRIS)（信息系统工程研究中心（LIRIS））；KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）
Artificial neural networks will always make a prediction, even when completely uncertain and regardless of the consequences. This obliviousness of uncertainty is a major obstacle towards their adoption in practice. Techniques exist, however, to estimate the two major types of uncertainty: model uncertainty and observation noise in the data. Bayesian neural networks are theoretically well-founded models that can learn the model uncertainty of their predictions. Minor modifications to these models and their loss functions allow learning the observation noise for individual samples as well. This …
The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；University of Tartu（塔尔图大学）
Reducing cycle time is a recurrent concern in the field of business process management. Depending on the process, various interventions may be triggered to reduce the cycle time of a case, for example, using a faster shipping service in an order-to-delivery process or giving a phone call to a customer to obtain missing information rather than waiting passively. Each of these interventions comes with a cost. This paper tackles the problem of determining if and when to trigger a time-reducing intervention in a way that maximizes the total net gain. The paper proposes a prescriptive process monit…
Prescriptive process monitoring is a family of techniques to optimize the performance of a business process by triggering interventions at runtime. Existing prescriptive process monitoring techniques assume that the number of interventions that may be triggered is unbounded. In practice, though, specific interventions consume resources with finite capacity. For example, in a loan origination process, an intervention may consist of preparing an alternative loan offer to increase the applicant's chances of taking a loan. This intervention requires a certain amount of time from a credit officer, …
Leveraging Data Augmentation and Siamese Learning for Predictive Process Monitoring
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands（数学与计算机科学系，埃因霍温理工大学，荷兰）；Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Padua, Italy（数学与计算机科学系，帕多瓦大学，意大利）
RLHGNN: Reinforcement Learning-driven Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network for Next Activity Prediction in Business Processes
College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University of Technology（浙江工业大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Visual Information Intelligent Processing（浙江省视觉信息智能处理重点实验室）；University of Southern Queensland（南方昆士兰大学）
Recurrent neural nets are widely used for predicting temporal data. Their inherent deep feedforward structure allows learning complex sequential patterns. It is believed that top-down feedback might be an important missing ingredient which in theory could help disambiguate similar patterns depending on broader context. In this paper we introduce surprisal-driven recurrent networks, which take into account past error information when making new predictions. This is achieved by continuously monitoring the discrepancy between most recent predictions and the actual observations. Furthermore, we sh…
An Innovative Data-Driven and Adaptive Reinforcement Learning Approach for Context-Aware Prescriptive Process Monitoring
Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science, University of Victoria, BC, Canada（工程与计算机科学学院，维多利亚大学）；Computer Science, Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science, University of British Columbia, BC, Canada（计算机科学，不列颠哥伦比亚大学理学院）
Runtime Monitoring and Enforcement of Conditional Fairness in Generative AIs
Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Germany Universit\'e Grenoble Alpes, France University of Warwick, United Kingdom CSX-AI, France SRI International, United States
Faculty of Engineering, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano（博洛尼亚-博尔扎诺自由大学工程学院）；Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering, Sapienza, Università di Roma（罗马大学计算机、控制与管理工程系）
