Publications

As the only research organization in the financial sector in several new technology areas, we are raising the status of
Hana Financial Group and achieving external achievements through world-renowned conferences.

Papers

Encoding resource experience for predictive process monitoring

Date of publication
2021.10.06
Issuing agency (Year)
Decision Support Systems(2021)
Author
Jongchan Kim, Marco Comuzzi, Marlon Dumas, Fabrizio Maria Maggi, Irene Teinemaa
Link
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167923621001792

Abstract

Events recorded during the execution of a business process can be used to train models to predict, at run-time, the 

outcome of each execution of the process (a.k.a. case). In this setting, the outcome of a case may refer to whether 

a given case led to a customer complaint or not, or to a product return or other claims, or whether a case was 

completed on time or not. Existing approaches to train such predictive models do not take into account infor-

mation about the prior experience of the (human) resources assigned to each task in the process. Instead, these 

approaches simply encode the resource who performs each task as a categorical (possibly one-hot encoded) 

feature. Yet, the experience of the resources involved in the execution of a case may clearly have an impact on the 

case outcome. For example, specialized resources or resources who are familiar with a given type of case, are 

more likely to execute the tasks in a case faster and more effectively, leading to a higher probability of a positive 

outcome. Motivated by this observation, this article proposes and evaluates a framework to extract features from 

event logs that capture the experience of the resources involved in a business process. The framework exploits 

traditional principles from the literature to capture resource experience, such as experiential learning and social 

ties on the workplace. The proposed framework is evaluated by comparing the performance of state-of-the-art 

predictive models trained with and without the proposed resource experience features, using publicly avail-

able event logs. The results show that the proposed resource experience features may improve the accuracy of 

predictive models, but that depends on the process execution context, such as the type of process generating an 

event log or the type of label that is predicted.