Business Process Remaining Time Prediction Based on Incremental Event Logs

Abstract

Predictive Process Monitoring (PPM) aims to predict the future state of running process instances to enable timely interventions to mitigate potential risks. As one of the most fundamental tasks in PPM, process remaining time prediction focuses on preventing timeout occurrences. While various deep learning-based approaches have been developed for this purpose, they often rely on pre-established static prediction models and struggle to maintain accurate predictions when the process undergoes dynamic changes, such as an expanding sales channels. To tackle this challenge, this paper proposes an incremental process remaining time prediction framework by continuously updating the prediction model based on an incremental event log. Specifically, a feature selection strategy is first introduced to extract effective features from event logs. Leveraging effective features can significantly improve the prediction quality by capturing the changes in process information. Then, three incremental log-based updating mechanisms, including period-based updating, quantity-based updating, and concept-drift-based updating, along with a reconstruction strategy, are proposed to dynamically adjust the prediction model in response to business changes. Finally, LSTM, Transformer, and Auto-encoder models are adapted and integrated into the proposed framework. The approach has been implemented and publicly released. Experimental evaluation using nine real-life event logs demonstrate that the proposed framework and its three instantiations (i.e., LSTM-based, Transformer-based, and Auto-encoder-based ones) outperform state-of-the-art techniques in terms of prediction accuracy.