A Framework for Streaming Event-Log Prediction in Business Processes
This work addresses the need for real-time prediction in business process management, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods by adapting them to a streaming context.
The authors tackled the problem of predicting event logs in streaming business processes by developing a Python framework that integrates various algorithms, including n-grams and LSTMs, and found that ensemble methods can outperform LSTMs, with basic models like n-grams performing better in early streaming stages.
We present a Python-based framework for event-log prediction in streaming mode, enabling predictions while data is being generated by a business process. The framework allows for easy integration of streaming algorithms, including language models like n-grams and LSTMs, and for combining these predictors using ensemble methods. Using our framework, we conducted experiments on various well-known process-mining data sets and compared classical batch with streaming mode. Though, in batch mode, LSTMs generally achieve the best performance, there is often an n-gram whose accuracy comes very close. Combining basic models in ensemble methods can even outperform LSTMs. The value of basic models with respect to LSTMs becomes even more apparent in streaming mode, where LSTMs generally lack accuracy in the early stages of a prediction run, while basic methods make sensible predictions immediately.