Leveraging a Heterogeneous Ensemble Learning for Outcome-Based Predictive Monitoring Using Business Process Event Logs

Abstract

Outcome-based predictive process monitoring concerns predicting the outcome of a running process case using historical events stored as so-called process event logs. This prediction problem has been approached using different learning models in the literature. Ensemble learners have been shown to be particularly effective in outcome-based business process predictive monitoring, even when compared with learners exploiting complex deep learning architectures. However, the ensemble learners that have been used in the literature rely on weak base learners, such as decision trees. In this article, an advanced stacking ensemble technique for outcome-based predictive monitoring is introduced. The proposed stacking ensemble employs strong learners as base classifiers, i.e., other ensembles. More specifically, we consider stacking of random forests, extreme gradient boosting machines, and gradient boosting machines to train a process outcome prediction model. We evaluate the proposed approach using publicly available event logs. The results show that the proposed model is a promising approach for the outcome-based prediction task. We extensively compare the performance differences among the proposed methods and the base strong learners, using also statistical tests to prove the generalizability of the results obtained.