Predictive Process Monitoring (PPM) in Process Mining (PM) uses predictive analytics to forecast business process progression. A key challenge is suffix prediction, forecasting future event sequences with activity labels, timestamps, and remaining runtime. Current techniques often focus on one-step-ahead predictions, rely on iterative feedback loops for suffix generation, and underutilize payload data. Additionally, many lag behind recent advancements in model architectures, sticking to LSTM-based models. Addressing these gaps, we propose SuTraN, a novel transformer architecture for PPM suffix prediction. SuTraN avoids iterative prediction loops and utilizes all available data, including event features, to forecast entire event suffixes in a single forward pass. Our approach integrates autoregressive suffix generation, data awareness, and seq2seq learning. Experimental results on real-life event logs demonstrate SuTraN’s superior performance in suffix prediction, highlighting its contributions often overlooked in current research.

Traditional geospatial predictive models for property valuation have naturally relied on coordinates as well as ‘hedonic’ (internal and external) features. In particular, location-centric methods such as Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) and Kriging have focused on intrinsic target characteristics together with distances between individual targets. However, especially in the context of heavily urbanized areas, these approaches might overlook crucial aspects arising from the underlying topological structure that presents itself in such areas. Concretely, in this work, we focus on the structure arising from the road network connecting properties. We introduce a novel though straightforward technique for feature engineering based on graphs constructed on a road network. We then extract relevant features from these and utilize those as inputs for predictive models and assess their performance benefits when used together with a variety of both well-known geospatial models and state-of-art machine learning models. To this end, we present an exhaustive experiment using four different real-life data sets across various regions and exhibiting sizes outperforming many comparative works in the field. Our findings reveal that our feature engineering approach offers significant improvements in predictive performance. Finally, we apply Shapley values as an interpretability technique to confirm the reliability and effectiveness of our approach.

When content consumers explicitly judge content positively, we consider them to be engaged. Unfortunately, explicit user evaluations are difficult to collect, as they require user effort. Therefore, we propose to use device interactions as implicit feedback to detect engagement. We assess the usefulness of swipe interactions on tablets for predicting engagement and make the comparison with using traditional features based on time spent. We gathered two unique datasets of more than 250,000 swipes, 100,000 unique article visits, and over 35,000 explicitly judged news articles by modifying two commonly used tablet apps of two newspapers. We tracked all device interactions of 407 experiment participants during one month of habitual news reading. We employed a behavioral metric as a proxy for engagement, because our analysis needed to be scalable to many users, and scanning behavior required us to allow users to indicate engagement quickly. We point out the importance of taking into account content ordering, report the most predictive features, zoom in on briefly read content and on the most frequently read articles. Our findings demonstrate that fine-grained tablet interactions are useful indicators of engagement for newsreaders on tablets. The best features successfully combine both time-based aspects and swipe interactions.

The selection of classifiers which are profitable is becoming more and more important in real-life situations such as customer churn management campaigns in the telecommunication sector. In previous works, the expected maximum profit (EMP) metric has been proposed, which explicitly takes the cost of offer and the customer lifetime value (CLV) of retained customers into account. It thus permits the selection of the most profitable classifier, which better aligns with business requirements of end-users and stake holders. However, modelers are currently limited to applying this metric in the evaluation step. Hence, we expand on the previous body of work and introduce a classifier that incorporates the EMP metric in the construction of a classification model. Our technique, called ProfLogit, explicitly takes profit maximization concerns into account during the training step, rather than the evaluation step. The technique is based on a logistic regression model which is trained using a genetic algorithm (GA). By means of an empirical benchmark study applied to real-life data sets, we show that ProfLogit generates substantial profit improvements compared to the classic logistic model for many data sets. In addition, profit-maximized coefficient estimates differ considerably in magnitude from the maximum likelihood estimates.

Process mining encompasses the research area which is concerned with knowledge discovery from event logs. One common process mining task focuses on conformance checking, comparing discovered or designed process models with actual real-life behavior as captured in event logs in order to assess the “goodness” of the process model. This paper introduces a novel conformance checking method to measure how well a process model performs in terms of precision and generalization with respect to the actual executions of a process as recorded in an event log. Our approach differs from related work in the sense that we apply the concept of so-called weighted artificial negative events toward conformance checking, leading to more robust results, especially when dealing with less complete event logs that only contain a subset of all possible process execution behavior. In addition, our technique offers a novel way to estimate a process model's ability to generalize. Existing literature has focused mainly on the fitness (recall) and precision (appropriateness) of process models, whereas generalization has been much more difficult to estimate. The described algorithms are implemented in a number of ProM plugins, and a Petri net conformance checking tool was developed to inspect process model conformance in a visual manner.

Process mining encompasses the research area which is concerned with knowledge discovery from information system event logs. Within the process mining research area, two prominent tasks can be discerned. First of all, process discovery deals with the automatic construction of a process model out of an event log. Secondly, conformance checking focuses on the assessment of the quality of a discovered or designed process model in respect to the actual behavior as captured in event logs. Hereto, multiple techniques and metrics have been developed and described in the literature. However, the process mining domain still lacks a comprehensive framework for assessing the goodness of a process model from a quantitative perspective. In this study, we describe the architecture of an extensible framework within ProM, allowing for the consistent, comparative and repeatable calculation of conformance metrics. For the development and assessment of both process discovery as well as conformance techniques, such a framework is considered greatly valuable.

Process discovery is the learning task that entails the construction of process models from event logs of information systems. Typically, these event logs are large data sets that contain the process executions by registering what activity has taken place at a certain moment in time. By far the most arduous challenge for process discovery algorithms consists of tackling the problem of accurate and comprehensible knowledge discovery from highly flexible environments. Event logs from such flexible systems often contain a large variety of process executions which makes the application of process mining most interesting. However, simply applying existing process discovery techniques will often yield highly incomprehensible process models because of their inaccuracy and complexity. With respect to resolving this problem, trace clustering is one very interesting approach since it allows to split up an existing event log so as to facilitate the knowledge discovery process. In this paper, we propose a novel trace clustering technique that significantly differs from previous approaches. Above all, it starts from the observation that currently available techniques suffer from a large divergence between the clustering bias and the evaluation bias. By employing an active learning inspired approach, this bias divergence is solved. In an assessment using four complex, real-life event logs, it is shown that our technique significantly outperforms currently available trace clustering techniques.