Title: Temporal Stability in Predictive Process Monitoring,
Abstract: Predictive process monitoring is concerned with the analysis of events
produced during the execution of a business process in order to predict as
early as possible the final outcome of an ongoing case. Traditionally,
predictive process monitoring methods are optimized with respect to accuracy.
However, in environments where users make decisions and take actions in
response to the predictions they receive, it is equally important to optimize
the stability of the successive predictions made for each case. To this end,
this paper defines a notion of temporal stability for binary classification
tasks in predictive process monitoring and evaluates existing methods with
respect to both temporal stability and accuracy. We find that methods based on
XGBoost and LSTM neural networks exhibit the highest temporal stability. We
then show that temporal stability can be enhanced by hyperparameter-optimizing
random forests and XGBoost classifiers with respect to inter-run stability.
Finally, we show that time series smoothing techniques can further enhance
temporal stability at the expense of slightly lower accuracy.