Predicting Outcomes of Business Process Executions Based on LSTM Neural Networks and Attention Mechanism

Abstract To effectively predict the outcome of an on-going process instance helps make an early decision, which plays an important role in so-called predictive process monitoring. Existing methods in this field are tailor-made for some empirical operations such as the prefix extraction, clustering, and encoding, leading that their relative accuracy is highly sensitive to the dataset. Moreover, they have limitations in real-time prediction applications due to the lengthy prediction time. Since Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) neural network provides a high precision in the prediction of sequential data in several areas, this paper investigates LSTM and its enhancements and proposes three different approaches to build more effective and efficient models for outcome prediction. The first move on enhancement is that we combine the original LSTM network from two directions, forward and backward, to capture more features from the completed cases. The second move on enhancement is that we add attention mechanism after extracting features in the hidden layer of LSTM network to distinct them from their attention weight. A series of extensive experiments are evaluated on twelve real datasets when comparing with other approaches. The results show that our approaches outperform the state-of-the-art ones in terms of prediction effectiveness and time performance.