Process Model Forecasting Using Time Series Analysis of Event Sequence Data

Process analytics is the field focusing on 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.

Comprehensive Process Drift Detection with Visual Analytics

Recent research has introduced ideas from concept drift into process mining to enable the analysis of changes in business processes over time. This stream of research, however, has not yet addressed the challenges of drift categorization, drilling-down, and quantification. In this paper, we propose a novel technique for managing process drifts, called Visual Drift Detection (VDD), which fulfills these requirements. The technique starts by clustering declarative process constraints discovered from recorded logs of executed business processes based on their similarity and then applies change point detection on the identified clusters to detect drifts. VDD complements these features with detailed visualizations and explanations of drifts. Our evaluation, both on synthetic and real-world logs, demonstrates all the aforementioned capabilities of the technique.