Temporal Stability in Predictive Process Monitoring

Abstract

Predictive process monitoring is concerned with the analysis of events produced during the execution of a business process in order to predict as early as possible the final outcome of an ongoing case. Traditionally, predictive process monitoring methods are optimized with respect to accuracy. However, in environments where users make decisions and take actions in response to the predictions they receive, it is equally important to optimize the stability of the successive predictions made for each case. To this end, this paper defines a notion of temporal stability for binary classification tasks in predictive process monitoring and evaluates existing methods with respect to both temporal stability and accuracy. We find that methods based on XGBoost and LSTM neural networks exhibit the highest temporal stability. We then show that temporal stability can be enhanced by hyperparameter-optimizing random forests and XGBoost classifiers with respect to inter-run stability. Finally, we show that time series smoothing techniques can further enhance temporal stability at the expense of slightly lower accuracy.

References in corpus (5)

• On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks
• Predictive Business Process Monitoring with LSTM Neural Networks
• Predicting Process Behaviour using Deep Learning
• Outcome-Oriented Predictive Process Monitoring: Review and Benchmark
• Generalising Random Forest Parameter Optimisation to Include Stability and Cost

Cited by in corpus (4)

• A systematic literature review on state-of-the-art deep learning methods for process prediction
• How do I update my model? On the resilience of Predictive Process Monitoring models to change
• Explainable Predictive Process Monitoring: A User Evaluation
• Automatically Reconciling the Trade-off between Prediction Accuracy and Earliness in Prescriptive Business Process Monitoring