Predicting business process behaviour is an important aspect of business process management. Motivated by research in natural language processing, this paper describes an application of deep learning with recurrent neural networks to the problem of predicting the next event in a business process. This is both a novel method in process prediction, which has largely relied on explicit process models, and also a novel application of deep learning methods. The approach is evaluated on two real datasets and our results surpass the state-of-the-art in prediction precision.

Partial least squares path modeling (PLS) was developed in the 1960s and 1970s as a method for predictive modeling. In the succeeding years, applied disciplines, including organizational and management research, have developed beliefs about the capabilities of PLS and its suitability for different applications. On close examination, some of these beliefs prove to be unfounded and to bear little correspondence to the actual capabilities of PLS. In this article, we critically examine several of these commonly held beliefs. We describe their origins, and, using simple examples, we demonstrate that many of these beliefs are not true. We conclude that the method is widely misunderstood, and our results cast strong doubts on its effectiveness for building and testing theory in organizational research.

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The ability to proactively monitor business processes is a main competitive differentiator for firms. Process execution logs generated by process aware information systems help to make process specific predictions for enabling a proactive situational awareness. The goal of the proposed approach is to predict the next process event from the completed activities of the running process instance, based on the execution log data from previously completed process instances. By predicting process events, companies can initiate timely interventions to address undesired deviations from the desired workflow. The paper proposes a multi-stage deep learning approach that formulates the next event prediction problem as a classification problem. Following a feature pre-processing stage with n-grams and feature hashing, a deep learning model consisting of an unsupervised pre-training component with stacked autoencoders and a supervised fine-tuning component is applied. Experiments on a variety of business process log datasets show that the multi-stage deep learning approach provides promising results. The study also compared the results to existing deep recurrent neural networks and conventional classification approaches. Furthermore, the paper addresses the identification of suitable hyperparameters for the proposed approach, and the handling of the imbalanced nature of business process event datasets.

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