Enhancing the Accuracy of Predictors of Activity Sequences of Business Processes

Predictive process monitoring is an evolving research field that studies how to train and use predictive models for operational decision-making. One of the problems studied in this field is that of predicting the sequence of upcoming activities in a case up to its completion, a.k.a. the case suffix. The prediction of case suffixes provides input to estimate short-term workloads and execution times under different resource schedules. Existing methods to address this problem often generate suffixes wherein some activities are repeated many times, whereas this pattern is not observed in the data. Closer examination shows that this shortcoming stems from the approach used to sample the successive activity instances to generate a case suffix. Accordingly, the paper introduces a sampling approach aimed at reducing repetitions of activities in the predicted case suffixes. The approach, namely Daemon Action, strikes a balance between exploration and exploitation when generating the successive activity instances. We enhance a deep learning approach for case suffix predictions using this sampling approach, and experimentally show that the enhanced approach outperforms the unenhanced ones on event logs that exhibits a high frequency of repeated activities with respect to both control-flow and temporal accuracy measures.