Text-Aware Predictive Monitoring of Business Processes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel text-aware process prediction model that leverages natural language data in event logs, significantly improving prediction accuracy over existing methods.

Contribution

The paper presents a new LSTM-based model that incorporates textual, categorical, and numerical data for real-time business process prediction.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods on real-world logs

Effectively utilizes natural language information in event data

Predicts activity, timestamp, outcome, and cycle time accurately

Abstract

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, implementation, and evaluation of a novel text-aware process prediction model based on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks and natural language models. The proposed model can take categorical, numerical and textual attributes in event data into account to predict the activity and timestamp of the next event, the outcome, and the cycle time of a running process instance. Experiments show that the text-aware model is able to outperform state-of-the-art process prediction methods on simulated and real-world event logs containing textual data.