Predictive Process Monitoring

Event logs arise in a wide range of real-world processes, capturing not only event activities and timestamps but also multi-modal contextual information. Existing event-sequence models, including many temporal point process approaches, primarily model event activities and timestamps while overlooking heterogeneous context, such as numerical measurements, categorical attributes, textual descriptions, and metadata associated with individual events and entire traces. In this paper, we propose Universal Multi-Modal Traceformer (UMT), a unified framework for incorporating heterogeneous process context into next-event prediction. Built on a Transformer backbone, UMT introduces a universal feature encoder that maps diverse feature types into a shared representation space and handles contextual information at both the event and trace levels. UMT further develops a per-event Perceiver module that dynamically weights contextual features and adaptively integrates them into event-token representations. To accommodate the heavy-tailed and potentially multi-modal distribution of inter-arrival times, UMT represents each interval at multiple temporal scales and jointly predicts the corresponding scale-specific quantities. Experiments on 13 real-world event logs show that UMT improves both next-event activity and time prediction over existing approaches.

Complete suffix prediction is challenging in sequential decision settings, where the same prefix can remain compatible with several plausible suffixes. We propose a graphbased metric-learning framework that reformulates complete suffix prediction as latent retrieval over process graphs. Prefixes and suffixes are represented as directed attributed graphs and encoded by edge-conditioned graph neural networks, allowing event-level activities and transition-level durations to be modelled jointly. Prefix representations are projected into the latent suffix space through a predictor trained with a joint reconstruction and contrastive objective strengthened using process-aware hard negatives. To stabilise the learned retrieval geometry, spectral normalisation, and retrieval robustness, spectral normalisation is applied to enforce a Lipschitz constraint on both encoders and predictor. Experiments on two real-life process datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves the best overall results across nearly all evaluated criteria. It improves semantic suffix accuracy measured by normalized Damerau-Levenshtein distance, yields strong retrieval quality through Recall@1, Recall@5, and MRR@5, and maintains temporal plausibility according to Mean Absolute Error. These results show that graph-based latent retrieval is an effective alternative to sequential suffix prediction for recommendation-oriented process monitoring under structural and KPI-related constraints.

Predictive process monitoring aims at forecasting various aspects of running processes. Among the different tasks, next activity prediction represents the most extensively investigated. However, only a limited number of existing approaches explicitly encode contextual information, i.e., the environmental conditions in which the process is executed, typically modeled through event log attributes or aggregated measures. In this paper, an approach based on the concept of Instance Graphs is introduced. To incorporate contextual process instances, several encoding strategies are proposed and evaluated by measuring their impact on prediction performance. For each encoding strategy, a set of prefix-Instance Graphs is generated and subsequently provided as input to a Graph Neural Network for the classification task. The proposed approach is evaluated on multiple real-world event logs, and the experimental results demonstrate that incorporating contextual process instances benefits prediction performance.

Industrial process monitoring is fundamental to the safety and economic performance of modern process plants. Current practice remains a one-task-one-model paradigm that is label-inefficient and prone to degradation under operating drift. Foundation models have reshaped language, vision, and generic time-series forecasting, but it has not been adapted to industrial process monitoring. This setting poses domain-specific challenges, including safety-critical decisions and asymmetric sampling between process variables and laboratory measurements. We propose the industrial process monitoring foundation model (IPM-FM). It first learns general-purpose representations from unlabeled industrial process data through self-supervised pretraining, then adapts to specific monitoring tasks using a small amount of task-labeled data, and finally produces calibrated predictions through an uncertainty-aware prediction head. IPM-FM integrates a self-supervised Informer backbone with a multi-criteria consensus feature selector, a recursive lag-feature regression head, and a calibrated Monte Carlo dropout uncertainty module. On a seven-year hydrotreater dataset for diesel flash-point soft sensing, IPM-FM attains an RMSE of 2.99, $R^2$ of 0.50, and 97% coverage of its 95% predictive interval, outperforming the strongest classical and from-scratch sequence baselines by 8.3% and 14.6% in RMSE respectively, supporting the viability of a unified pretraining--adaptation framework for industrial process monitoring.

Predictive process monitoring (PPM) leverages event logs to forecast the future of running process instances, for instance, predicting the next activity, the remaining time until case completion, or the time to the next event. While PPM research in recent years has been dominated by deep sequence models trained from scratch, such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models, foundation-model approaches---particularly large language models (LLMs)---are increasingly explored for PPM. At the same time, tabular foundation models with in-context learning capabilities offer a promising alternative but have not yet been systematically benchmarked for PPM. Thus, it remains unclear whether classical sequence-based models remain competitive in this evolving landscape. This paper compares the three modeling paradigms both conceptually and empirically through a controlled benchmark across multiple datasets and prediction tasks. The results show that sequence models consistently perform best for next activity prediction, whereas tabular foundation models are competitive on temporal tasks, with LLMs usually lagging behind despite higher cost.

Predictive process monitoring supports the optimization and control of operational business processes by forecasting the future state or outcome of ongoing cases. While deep neural networks have achieved strong performance for these tasks by modeling sequential dependencies in event logs, their black-box nature limits trust and practical adoption. Feature attribution methods are often used to address this, but applying them directly poses a dilemma: event-level attributions impose high computational complexity for long traces, while explanations based on aggregated trace representations often fail to capture the underlying control-flow dynamics. To address this issue, we propose a local post-hoc explainability method for deep neural networks in outcome prediction. The method relies on a control-flow-aware segmentation algorithm that partitions a trace into meaningful segments and supports the computation of segment-level SHAP explanations. This makes it possible to identify which parts of a trace influence a prediction and which change points steer the case toward the predicted outcome. We assess the proposed segmentation method on a synthetic dataset with known process logic, where meaningful change points can be explicitly verified, and we demonstrate its usefulness on real-world event logs from a loan application process and an administrative process of a Dutch municipality.

Structurally constrained event sequence generation remains challenging because generated paths must preserve transition feasibility, temporal order, termination, and attribute consistency. In predictive process monitoring (PPM), this challenge appears as full event sequence generation, whereas existing work mainly addresses component tasks such as next activity, remaining time, outcome, and attribute prediction. This paper proposes the Graph Grounded Cross Attention Transformer Neural Network (GGATN) for this unified PPM task. GGATN uses a global process graph as structured activity memory, contextualizes sequence positions through Transformer self attention, and injects process topology through graph grounded cross attention. Unlike autoregressive decoding, GGATN generates activities, timestamps, length, and event level and sequence level attributes in a single pass, followed by Viterbi style graph constrained decoding for feasible paths and explicit termination. Experiments on six benchmark event logs show more reliable generation quality than local instruction prompted LLM baselines. GGATN achieves strong performance on sequence similarity, Damerau Levenshtein similarity, bigram based control flow similarity, and duration distribution, while maintaining zero hallucinated activities and zero sequence level attribute inconsistency. Ablation analyses confirm the global graph encoder as a stable structural prior. Interpretability analyses show how graph structure, sequence context, feedback refinement, and constrained decoding shape generation.

Next activity prediction (NAP) is a cornerstone of predictive process monitoring (PPM), enabling organizations to move from retrospective analysis to proactive process steering. The PPM field has progressed from classical machine learning through deep learning architectures such as LSTMs and Transformers to large language models (LLMs). Despite growing model complexity, no benchmark jointly compares LLMs, Transformers, LSTMs, and simple baselines in a direct sequence modeling setting for NAP. In this paper, we fill this gap with a systematic benchmark. We compare vocabulary-adapted LLMs, Transformers trained from scratch, LLM-distilled Transformers, and LSTMs against a simple counting-based argmax baseline across seven real-life event logs. Our results tell a David vs. Goliath story: pretraining confers no consistent improvement over training from scratch, model size shows little effect on performance, and on most datasets the argmax baseline matches or approaches the performance of billion-parameter LLMs.

This paper presents a reproducible and process-aware pipeline for predictive monitoring of clinical pathways. The approach integrates data lifting, temporal reconstruction, event log construction, prefix-based representations, and predictive modeling to support continuous reasoning on partially observed patient trajectories, overcoming the limitations of traditional retrospective process mining. The framework is evaluated on COVID-19 clinical pathways using ICU admission as the prediction target, considering 4,479 patient cases and 46,804 prefixes. Predictive models are trained and evaluated using a case-level split, with 896 patients in the test set. Logistic Regression achieves the best performance (AUC 0.906, F1-score 0.835). A detailed prefix-based analysis shows that predictive performance improves progressively as new clinical events become available, with AUC increasing from 0.642 at early stages to 0.942 at later stages of the pathway. The results highlight two key findings: predictive signals emerge progressively along clinical pathways, and process-aware representations enable effective early risk estimation from evolving patient trajectories. Overall, the findings suggest that predictive monitoring in healthcare is best conceived as a continuous, dynamically aware process, in which risk estimates are progressively refined as the patient journey evolves.