LSTM Networks for Data-Aware Remaining Time Prediction of Business Process Instances

Predicting the completion time of business process instances would be a very helpful aid when managing processes under service level agreement constraints. The ability to know in advance the trend of running process instances would allow business managers to react in time, in order to prevent delays or undesirable situations. However, making such accurate forecasts is not easy: many factors may influence the required time to complete a process instance. In this paper, we propose an approach based on deep Recurrent Neural Networks (specifically LSTMs) that is able to exploit arbitrary information associated to single events, in order to produce an as-accurate-as-possible prediction of the completion time of running instances. Experiments on real-world datasets confirm the quality of our proposal.Comment: Article accepted for publication in 2017 IEEE Symposium on Deep Learning (IEEE DL'17) @ SSC

A Literature Review on Predictive Monitoring of Business Processes

Oleme läbi vaadanud mitmesuguseid ennetava jälgimise meetodeid äriprotsessides. Prognoositavate seirete eesmärk on aidata ettevõtetel oma eesmärke saavutada, aidata neil valida õige ärimudel, prognoosida tulemusi ja aega ning muuta äriprotsessid riskantsemaks. Antud väitekirjaga oleme hoolikalt kogunud ja üksikasjalikult läbi vaadanud selle väitekirja teemal oleva kirjanduse. Kirjandusuuringu tulemustest ja tähelepanekutest lähtuvalt oleme hoolikalt kavandanud ennetava jälgimisraamistiku. Raamistik on juhendiks ettevõtetele ja teadlastele, teadustöötajatele, kes uurivad selles valdkonnas ja ettevõtetele, kes soovivad neid tehnikaid oma valdkonnas rakendada.The goal of predictive monitoring is to help the business achieve their goals, help them take the right business path, predict outcomes, estimate delivery time, and make business processes risk aware. In this thesis, we have carefully collected and reviewed in detail all literature which falls in this process mining category. The objective of the thesis is to design a Predictive Monitoring Framework and classify the different predictive monitoring techniques. The framework acts as a guide for researchers and businesses. Researchers who are investigating in this field and businesses who want to apply these techniques in their respective field

Classifying Process Instances Using Recurrent Neural Networks

Process Mining consists of techniques where logs created by operative systems are transformed into process models. In process mining tools it is often desired to be able to classify ongoing process instances, e.g., to predict how long the process will still require to complete, or to classify process instances to different classes based only on the activities that have occurred in the process instance thus far. Recurrent neural networks and its subclasses, such as Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), have been demonstrated to be able to learn relevant temporal features for subsequent classification tasks. In this paper we apply recurrent neural networks to classifying process instances. The proposed model is trained in a supervised fashion using labeled process instances extracted from event log traces. This is the first time we know of GRU having been used in classifying business process instances. Our main experimental results shows that GRU outperforms LSTM remarkably in training time while giving almost identical accuracies to LSTM models. Additional contributions of our paper are improving the classification model training time by filtering infrequent activities, which is a technique commonly used, e.g., in Natural Language Processing (NLP).Peer reviewe

PREDICTING THE DURATION OF SURGERIES TO IMPROVE PROCESS EFFICIENCY IN HOSPITALS

Predicting the duration of surgeries is an important task because of the many dependencies between surgery processes and the hospital processes within other departments. Thus, accurate predictions allow for better coordinating patient processes throughout the hospital. Prior data-driven research provides evidence for accurate predictions of surgery durations enhancing the efficiency of surgery schedules. However, the current prediction models require large sets of features, which make their adoption more intricate. Moreover, prediction models focus on the surgery department and neglect potential effects on other departments. We use a unique dataset of about 17,000 surgeries to study how particular features and machine learning algorithms affect the prediction accuracy of major surgery steps. The prediction models that we study require few features and are easy to apply. The empirical findings can be useful for the design of surgery scheduling systems

Leveraging Multi-Perspective A priori Knowledge in Predictive Business Process Monitoring

Äriprotsesside ennestusseire on valdkond, mis on pühendunud käimasolevate äriprotsesside tuleviku ennustamisele kasutades selleks minevikus sooritatud äriprotsesside kohta käivaid andmeid. Valdav osa uurimustööst selles valdkonnas keskendub ainult seda tüüpi andmetele, jättes tähelepanuta täiendavad teadmised (a priori teadmised) protsessi teostumise kohta tulevikus. Hiljuti pakuti välja lähenemine, mis võimaldab a priori teadmisi kasutada LTL-reeglite näol. Kuid tõsiasjana on antud tehnika limiteeritud äriprotsessi kontroll-voole, jättes välja võimaluse väljendada a priori teadmisi, mis puudutavad lisaks kontrollvoole ka informatsiooni protsessis leiduvate atribuutide kohta (multiperspektiivsed a priori teadmised). Me pakume välja lahenduse, mis võimaldab seda tüüpi teadmiste kasutuse, tehes multiperspektiivseid ennustusi käimasoleva äriprotsessi kohta. Tulemused, milleni jõuti rakendades väljapakutud tehnikat 20-le tehisärilogile ning ühele elulisele ärilogile, näitavad, et meie lähenemine suudab pakkuda konkurentsivõimelisi ennustusi.Predictive business process monitoring is an area dedicated to exploiting past process execution data in order to predict the future unfolding of a currently executed business process instance. Most of the research done in this domain focuses on exploiting the past process execution data only, leaving neglected additional a priori knowledge that might become available at runtime. Recently, an approach was proposed, which allows to leverage a priori knowledge on the control flow in the form of LTL-rules. However, cases exist in which more granular a priori knowledge becomes available about perspectives that go be-yond the pure control flow like data, time and resources (multiperspective a priori knowledge). In this thesis, we propose a technique that enables to leverage multi-perspective a priori knowledge when making predictions of complex sequences, i.e., sequences of events with a subset of the data attributes attached to them. The results, obtained by applying the proposed technique to 20 synthetic logs and 1 real life log, show that the proposed technique is able to overcome state-of-the-art approaches by successfully leveraging multiperspective a priori knowledge