Predictive analytics for semi-structured case oriented business processes

Abstract

The goal of our work is to examine the utility of predictive analytics for case-oriented semi-structured business processes. As a first step towards this goal, this paper describes an approach to leverage case history to predict outcomes at decision points in case-oriented semi-structured processes, and examine how the contents of documents at these decision points influence their outcomes. We apply an ant-colony optimization (ACO) based algorithm to create a probabilistic activity graph from traces, and use it to identify key decision points in a given process. For each activity node that represents a decision point in the mined probabilistic graph, the likelihood of different outcomes from the node can be correlated with the contents of documents accessed by the activity node. This is achieved by using a standard decision tree learning algorithm. We validate our approach on correlated case instance traces generated by a simulator that we constructed to implement non-deterministic executions of an automobile insurance claims scenario. In practice we find that our approach can lead to useful predictions at different stages of execution in a semi-structured case oriented process. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.