Process Model Forecasting Using Time Series Analysis of Event Sequence Data

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method to forecast entire process models from historical event sequence data by representing behavioral aspects as time series and applying forecasting techniques, aiding in understanding process evolution.

Contribution

It fills the gap in process analytics by developing a technique to predict future process models from event logs, enabling better management of process drift and bottlenecks.

Findings

Demonstrates high accuracy on real-world event logs.

Enables proactive process management.

Provides a new perspective on process evolution forecasting.

Abstract

Process analytics is an umbrella of data-driven techniques which includes making predictions for individual process instances or overall process models. At the instance level, various novel techniques have been recently devised, tackling next activity, remaining time, and outcome prediction. At the model level, there is a notable void. It is the ambition of this paper to fill this gap. To this end, we develop a technique to forecast the entire process model from historical event data. A forecasted model is a will-be process model representing a probable future state of the overall process. Such a forecast helps to investigate the consequences of drift and emerging bottlenecks. Our technique builds on a representation of event data as multiple time series, each capturing the evolution of a behavioural aspect of the process model, such that corresponding forecasting techniques can be applied. Our implementation demonstrates the accuracy of our technique on real-world event log data.