Leveraging path information to generate predictions for parallel business processes

Abstract

In semi-structured processes, the set of activities that need to be performed, their order and whether additional steps are required are determined by human judgment. There is a growing demand for operational support of such processes during runtime particularly in the form of predictions about the likelihood of future tasks. We address the problem of making predictions for a running instance of a semi-structured process that contains parallel execution paths where the execution path taken by a process instance influences its outcome. In particular, we consider five different models for how to represent an execution trace as a path attribute for training a prediction model. We provide a methodology to determine whether parallel paths are independent, and whether it is worthwhile to model execution paths as independent based on a comparison of the information gain obtained by dependent and independent path representations. We tested our methodology by simulating a marketing campaign as a business process model and selected decision trees as the prediction model. In the evaluation, we compare the complexity and prediction accuracy of a prediction model trained with five different models.