Abstract
Context: Tool support for business process management (BPM) is improving more and more. Often, machine learning techniques are used to recognize certain execution patterns, to optimize workflows and to observe or predict processes. Frequently, many organisations cannot meet the fundamental prerequisites of machine learning methods since less data is recorded and therefore available for analysis. ...
Abstract
Context: Tool support for business process management (BPM) is improving more and more. Often, machine learning techniques are used to recognize certain execution patterns, to optimize workflows and to observe or predict processes. Frequently, many organisations cannot meet the fundamental prerequisites of machine learning methods since less data is recorded and therefore available for analysis. Most machine learning techniques rely on big and sufficient data source sets that can be analyzed. Small Sample Learning (SSL) tackles the issue of implementing machine learning methods in environments where only quantitatively insufficient datasets are available. These methods are strongly tailored to computer vision or natural language processing problems, which is why they are still neglected in the BPM area. Objective: This paper motivates the use of SSL methods in the BPM area and fosters a research stream that is concerned with the transferability to and the application of these methods in the BPM area. Method: We propose a concept for leveraging SSL methods in BPM and illustrate the idea exemplarly in the field of process mining. Results: Reasons for the need of SSL methods in the BPM area and a conceptual approach for transferring existing SSL methods to the BPM area. The feasibility of our apprach is shown by a brief overview of a primary study leveraging SSL methods for process prediction. Conclusions: Many areas of process mining or BPM in general depend on a sufficient amount of (training) data. Often small and medium sized companies lack "big data", which is why advantages of machine learning and data analysis in the context of BPM cannot be applied. Existing methods that deal with insufficient data are very domain-specific and must be transferred to the process mining area respectively the BPM area.
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