Jari Peeperkorn

Jari Peeperkorn, Seppe vanden Broucke, Jochen De Weerdt

Various methods using machine and deep learning have been proposed to tackle different tasks in predictive process monitoring, forecasting for an ongoing case e.g. the most likely next event or suffix, its remaining time, or an outcome-related variable. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs), and more specifically long short-term memory nets (LSTMs), stand out in terms of popularity. In this work, we investigate the capabilities of such an LSTM to actually learn the underlying process model structure of an event log. We introduce an evaluation framework that combines variant-based resampling and custom metrics for fitness, precision and generalization. We evaluate 4 hypotheses concerning the learning capabilities of LSTMs, the effect of overfitting countermeasures, the level of incompleteness in the training set and the level of parallelism in the underlying process model. We confirm that LSTMs can struggle to learn process model structure, even with simplistic process data and in a very lenient setup. Taking the correct anti-overfitting measures can alleviate the problem. However, these measures did not present themselves to be optimal when selecting hyperparameters purely on predicting accuracy. We also found that decreasing the amount of information seen by the LSTM during training, causes a sharp drop in generalization and precision scores. In our experiments, we could not identify a relationship between the extent of parallelism in the model and the generalization capability, but they do indicate that the process' complexity might have impact.

Jarne Vandenabeele, Gilles Vermaut, Jari Peeperkorn et al.

Reliable remaining time prediction of ongoing business processes is a highly relevant topic. One example is order delivery, a key competitive factor in e.g. retailing as it is a main driver of customer satisfaction. For realising timely delivery, an accurate prediction of the remaining time of the delivery process is crucial. Within the field of process mining, a wide variety of remaining time prediction techniques have already been proposed. In this work, we extend remaining time prediction based on stochastic Petri nets with generally distributed transitions with k-nearest neighbors. The k-nearest neighbors algorithm is performed on simple vectors storing the time passed to complete previous activities. By only taking a subset of instances, a more representative and stable stochastic Petri Net is obtained, leading to more accurate time predictions. We discuss the technique and its basic implementation in Python and use different real world data sets to evaluate the predictive power of our extension. These experiments show clear advantages in combining both techniques with regard to predictive power.

Johannes De Smedt, Jari Peeperkorn, Artem Polyvyanyy et al.

Deep learning has driven many recent advances in process analytics, especially for predictive and prescriptive monitoring. However, standard objectives such as cross-entropy optimize local next-step likelihoods and only implicitly capture control-flow structure. As a result, models can achieve high token-level accuracy while permitting imprecise global behaviour. We introduce DIFF-ERO, a conformance-aware loss function for deep learning models on process data. DIFF-ERO is a differentiable formulation of entropy-based stochastic conformance that incorporates control-flow information during training. Our approach constructs batch-level stochastic transition matrices with soft edge memberships, allowing structural precision and recall signals to directly inform backpropagation. The loss is model-agnostic and can be applied whenever the final representation parametrizes stochastic transitions. We instantiate DIFF-ERO in transformer encoder-decoder pipelines for next-activity prediction and use it jointly with cross-entropy to analyse its theoretical components with respect to convergence. Across benchmarks comparing other loss functions and targets, DIFF-ERO shows improved predictive performance where structure matters most while maintaining parity elsewhere. At the same time, the learned stochastic automaton converges towards the structural ground truth, indicating that the network internalizes process model structure.

Jari Peeperkorn, Simon De Vos

Predictive process monitoring focuses on forecasting future states of ongoing process executions, such as predicting the outcome of a particular case. In recent years, the application of machine learning models in this domain has garnered significant scientific attention. When using historical execution data, which may contain biases or exhibit unfair behavior, these biases may be encoded into the trained models. Consequently, when such models are deployed to make decisions or guide interventions for new cases, they risk perpetuating this unwanted behavior. This work addresses group fairness in predictive process monitoring by investigating independence, i.e. ensuring predictions are unaffected by sensitive group membership. We explore independence through metrics for demographic parity such as $Δ$DP, as well as recently introduced, threshold-independent distribution-based alternatives. Additionally, we propose a composite loss function existing of binary cross-entropy and a distribution-based loss (Wasserstein) to train models that balance predictive performance and fairness, and allow for customizable trade-offs. The effectiveness of both the fairness metrics and the composite loss functions is validated through a controlled experimental setup.

Rafael Seidi Oyamada, Jari Peeperkorn, Jochen De Weerdt et al.

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a prominent area of interest across various research domains, including Process Mining (PM). Current applications in PM have predominantly centered on prompt engineering strategies or the transformation of event logs into narrative-style datasets, thereby exploiting the semantic capabilities of LLMs to address diverse tasks. In contrast, this study investigates the direct adaptation of pretrained LLMs to process data without natural language reformulation, motivated by the fact that these models excel in generating sequences of tokens, similar to the objective in PM. More specifically, we focus on parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques to mitigate the computational overhead typically associated with such models. Our experimental setup focuses on Predictive Process Monitoring (PPM), and considers both single- and multi-task predictions. The results demonstrate a potential improvement in predictive performance over state-of-the-art recurrent neural network (RNN) approaches and recent narrative-style-based solutions, particularly in the multi-task setting. Additionally, our fine-tuned models exhibit faster convergence and require significantly less hyperparameter optimization.

Jari Peeperkorn, Johannes De Smedt, Jochen De Weerdt

Process discovery algorithms automatically extract process models from event logs, but high variability often results in complex and hard-to-understand models. To mitigate this issue, trace clustering techniques group process executions into clusters, each represented by a simpler and more understandable process model. Model-driven trace clustering improves on this by assigning traces to clusters based on their conformity to cluster-specific process models. However, most existing clustering techniques rely on either no process model discovery, or non-stochastic models, neglecting the frequency or probability of activities and transitions, thereby limiting their capability to capture real-world execution dynamics. We propose a novel model-driven trace clustering method that optimizes stochastic process models within each cluster. Our approach uses entropic relevance, a stochastic conformance metric based on directly-follows probabilities, to guide trace assignment. This allows clustering decisions to consider both structural alignment with a cluster's process model and the likelihood that a trace originates from a given stochastic process model. The method is computationally efficient, scales linearly with input size, and improves model interpretability by producing clusters with clearer control-flow patterns. Extensive experiments on public real-life datasets show that our method outperforms existing alternatives in representing process behavior and reveals how clustering performance rankings can shift when stochasticity is considered.

Alexander Stevens, Jari Peeperkorn, Johannes De Smedt et al.

In predictive process monitoring, predictive models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, where input perturbations can lead to incorrect predictions. Unlike in computer vision, where these perturbations are designed to be imperceptible to the human eye, the generation of adversarial examples in predictive process monitoring poses unique challenges. Minor changes to the activity sequences can create improbable or even impossible scenarios to occur due to underlying constraints such as regulatory rules or process constraints. To address this, we focus on generating realistic adversarial examples tailored to the business process context, in contrast to the imperceptible, pixel-level changes commonly seen in computer vision adversarial attacks. This paper introduces two novel latent space attacks, which generate adversaries by adding noise to the latent space representation of the input data, rather than directly modifying the input attributes. These latent space methods are domain-agnostic and do not rely on process-specific knowledge, as we restrict the generation of adversarial examples to the learned class-specific data distributions by directly perturbing the latent space representation of the business process executions. We evaluate these two latent space methods with six other adversarial attacking methods on eleven real-life event logs and four predictive models. The first three attacking methods directly permute the activities of the historically observed business process executions. The fourth method constrains the adversarial examples to lie within the same data distribution as the original instances, by projecting the adversarial examples to the original data distribution.

Jari Peeperkorn, Seppe vanden Broucke, Jochen De Weerdt

Predictive process monitoring concerns itself with the prediction of ongoing cases in (business) processes. Prediction tasks typically focus on remaining time, outcome, next event or full case suffix prediction. Various methods using machine and deep learning havebeen proposed for these tasks in recent years. Especially recurrent neural networks (RNNs) such as long short-term memory nets (LSTMs) have gained in popularity. However, no research focuses on whether such neural network-based models can truly learn the structure of underlying process models. For instance, can such neural networks effectively learn parallel behaviour or loops? Therefore, in this work, we propose an evaluation scheme complemented with new fitness, precision, and generalisation metrics, specifically tailored towards measuring the capacity of deep learning models to learn process model structure. We apply this framework to several process models with simple control-flow behaviour, on the task of next-event prediction. Our results show that, even for such simplistic models, careful tuning of overfitting countermeasures is required to allow these models to learn process model structure.