SCOPE: Sequential Causal Optimization of Process Interventions

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: De Moor, Jakob, Weytjens, Hans, De Smedt, Johannes, De Weerdt, Jochen
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917192246755328
author De Moor, Jakob
Weytjens, Hans
De Smedt, Johannes
De Weerdt, Jochen
author_facet De Moor, Jakob
Weytjens, Hans
De Smedt, Johannes
De Weerdt, Jochen
contents Prescriptive Process Monitoring (PresPM) recommends interventions during business processes to optimize key performance indicators (KPIs). In realistic settings, interventions are rarely isolated: organizations need to align sequences of interventions to jointly steer the outcome of a case. Existing PresPM approaches fall short in this respect. Many focus on a single intervention decision, while others treat multiple interventions independently, ignoring how they interact over time. Methods that do address these dependencies depend either on simulation or data augmentation to approximate the process to train a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent, which can create a reality gap and introduce bias. We introduce SCOPE, a PresPM approach that learns aligned sequential intervention recommendations. SCOPE employs backward induction to estimate the effect of each candidate intervention action, propagating its impact from the final decision point back to the first. By leveraging causal learners, our method can utilize observational data directly, unlike methods that require constructing process approximations for reinforcement learning. Experiments on both an existing synthetic dataset and a new semi-synthetic dataset show that SCOPE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art PresPM techniques in optimizing the KPI. The novel semi-synthetic setup, based on a real-life event log, is provided as a reusable benchmark for future work on sequential PresPM.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_17629
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SCOPE: Sequential Causal Optimization of Process Interventions
De Moor, Jakob
Weytjens, Hans
De Smedt, Johannes
De Weerdt, Jochen
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Prescriptive Process Monitoring (PresPM) recommends interventions during business processes to optimize key performance indicators (KPIs). In realistic settings, interventions are rarely isolated: organizations need to align sequences of interventions to jointly steer the outcome of a case. Existing PresPM approaches fall short in this respect. Many focus on a single intervention decision, while others treat multiple interventions independently, ignoring how they interact over time. Methods that do address these dependencies depend either on simulation or data augmentation to approximate the process to train a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent, which can create a reality gap and introduce bias. We introduce SCOPE, a PresPM approach that learns aligned sequential intervention recommendations. SCOPE employs backward induction to estimate the effect of each candidate intervention action, propagating its impact from the final decision point back to the first. By leveraging causal learners, our method can utilize observational data directly, unlike methods that require constructing process approximations for reinforcement learning. Experiments on both an existing synthetic dataset and a new semi-synthetic dataset show that SCOPE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art PresPM techniques in optimizing the KPI. The novel semi-synthetic setup, based on a real-life event log, is provided as a reusable benchmark for future work on sequential PresPM.
title SCOPE: Sequential Causal Optimization of Process Interventions
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17629