Predicting Process Behaviour using Deep Learning

Joerg Evermann, Jana-Rebecca Rehse, Peter Fettke

Published 2016-12-14Version 1

Predicting business process behaviour, such as the final state of a running process, the remaining time to completion or the next activity of a running process, 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. The paper offers recommendations for researchers and practitioners and points out areas for future applications of deep learning in business process management.