Using convolutional neural networks for predictive process analytics

Predictive process monitoring has recently become one of the main enablers of data-driven insights in process mining. As an application of predictive analytics, process prediction is mainly concerned with predicting the evolution of running traces based on models extracted from historical event logs. This paper presents a process mining approach, which uses convolutional neural networks to equip the execution scenario of a business process with a means to predict the next activity in a running trace. The basic idea is to convert the temporal data enclosed in the historical event log of a business process into spatial data so as to treat them as images. To this purpose, every trace of the event log is first transformed into the set of its prefix traces (i.e. sequences of events that represent the prefix of a trace). These prefix traces are mapped into 2D image-like data structures. Created spatial data are finally used to train a Convolutional Neural Network, in order to learn a deep learning model capable to predict the next activity (i.e. the activity associated to the event occurring after the last event in the considered prefix trace). This predictive deep model can be employed as a powerful service to support participants in performing business processes since it guarantees a higher utilization by acting proactively in anticipation. Preliminary tests with two benchmark logs are carried out to investigate the viability of the proposed approach