A data-adaptive trace abstraction approach to the prediction of business process performances

This paper presents a novel approach to the discovery of predictive process models, which are meant to support the run-time prediction of some performance indicator (e.g., the remaining processing time) on new ongoing process instances. To this purpose, we combine a series of data mining techniques (ranging from pattern mining, to non-parametric regression and to predictive clustering) with ad-hoc data transformation and abstraction mechanisms. As a result, a modular representation of the process is obtained, where different performancerelevant variants of it are provided with separate regression models, and discriminated on the basis of context information. Notably, the approach is capable to look at the given log traces at a proper level of abstraction, in a pretty automatic and transparent fashion, which reduces the need for heavy intervention by the analyst (which is, indeed, a major drawback of previous solutions in the literature). The approach has been validated on a real application scenario, with satisfactory results, in terms of both prediction accuracy and robustness.