Predicting the completion time of business process instances would be a very helpful aid when managing processes under service level agreement constraints. The ability to know in advance the trend of running process instances would allow business managers to react in time, in order to prevent delays or undesirable situations. However, making such accurate forecasts is not easy: many factors may influence the required time to complete a process instance. In this paper, we propose an approach based on deep Recurrent Neural Networks (specifically LSTMs) that is able to exploit arbitrary information associated to single events, in order to produce an as-accurate-as-possible prediction of the completion time of running instances. Experiments on real-world datasets confirm the quality of our proposal.

Recently, many researchers have been focusing on the definition of neural networks for graphs. The basic component for many of these approaches remains the graph convolution idea proposed almost a decade ago. In this paper, we extend this basic component, following an intuition derived from the well-known convolutional filters over multi-dimensional tensors. In particular, we derive a simple, efficient and effective way to introduce a hyper-parameter on graph convolutions that influences the filter size, i.e., its receptive field over the considered graph. We show with experimental results on real-world graph datasets that the proposed graph convolutional filter improves the predictive performance of Deep Graph Convolutional Networks.