Path Complex Neural Networks for Sequential Process Activities Classification

Process mining aims to uncover, track, and enhance real-world workflows by deriving insights from event logs commonly found in modern information systems. With the growing focus on improving productivity within complex business operations, recent research has looked into developing process models to improve business performance metrics. As such, this study aims to enhance process mining from event logs by proposing a novel path-complex construction based on process mining sequential data and a path-complex-based message-passing mechanism for higher-order structural information. We adopt path-complex representations for event logs and their temporal connections developed from instance graphs. Representations are identified and optimised for 0-paths (events), 1-paths (two events in chronological order) and 2-paths (three consecutive events) to characterise intrinsic higher-order information among events. The proposed framework, Path Complex Neural Networks (PCNN), leverages the advantages of topological deep learning and obtains representations for higher-order complexes inductively. Additionally, we evaluated the results with four real-world benchmark datasets and found that PCNN outperforms existing models in analysing sequential and complex process data.