# Encoder-Decoder Generative Adversarial Nets for Suffix Generation and Remaining Time Prediction of Business Process Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.16030 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.16030/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jul 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [ProcessTransformer: Predictive Business Process Monitoring with Transformer Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00721/) (2021)
- [Modeling Events and Interactions through Temporal Processes -- A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06067/) (2023)
- [Predictive Object-Centric Process Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10017/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper proposes an encoder-decoder architecture grounded on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), that generates a sequence of activities and their timestamps in an end-to-end way. GANs work well with differentiable data such as images. However, a suffix is a sequence of categorical items. To this end, we use the Gumbel-Softmax distribution to get a differentiable continuous approximation. The training works by putting one neural network against the other in a two-player game (hence the "adversarial" nature), which leads to generating suffixes close to the ground truth. From the experimental evaluation it emerges that the approach is superior to the baselines in terms of the accuracy of the predicted suffixes and corresponding remaining times, despite using a naive feature encoding and only engineering features based on control flow and events completion time.