Abstract--In bus arrival time prediction, the process of organizing road infrastructure network data into homogeneous entities is known as segmentation. Segmenting a road network is widely recognized as the first and most critical step in developing an arrival time prediction system, particularly for auto-regressive-based approaches. Traditional methods typically employ a uniform segmentation strategy, which fails to account for varying physical constraints along roads, such as road conditions, intersections, and points of interest, thereby limiting prediction efficiency. In this paper, we propose a Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based approach to efficiently and adaptively learn non-uniform road segments for arrival time prediction. Our method decouples the prediction process into two stages: 1) Nonuniform road segments are extracted based on their impact scores using the proposed RL framework; and 2) A linear prediction model is applied to the selected segments to make predictions. This method ensures optimal segment selection while maintaining computational efficiency, offering a significant improvement over traditional uniform approaches. Furthermore, our experimental results suggest that the linear approach can even achieve better performance than more complex methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method, which not only enhances efficiency but also improves learning performance on large-scale benchmarks.

Matching users to the right items at the right time is a fundamental task in recommendation systems.

Marked Temporal Point Process (MTPP) has been well studied to model the event distribution in marked event streams, which can be used to predict the mark and arrival time of the next event. However, existing studies overlook that the distribution of event marks is highly imbalanced in many real-world applications, with some marks being frequent but others rare. The imbalance poses a significant challenge to the performance of the next event prediction, especially for events of rare marks. To address this issue, we propose a thresholding method, which learns thresholds to tune the mark probability normalized by the mark's prior probability to optimize mark prediction, rather than predicting the mark directly based on the mark probability as in existing studies. In conjunction with this method, we predict the mark first and then the time. In particular, we develop a novel neural MTPP model to support effective time sampling and estimation of mark probability without computationally expensive numerical improper integration. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our solution against various baselines for the next event mark and time prediction. The code is available at https://github.com/undes1red/IFNMTPP.

Predictive process monitoring is a sub-domain of process mining which aims to forecast the future of ongoing process executions. One common prediction target is the remaining time, meaning the time that will elapse until a process execution is completed. In this paper, we compare four different remaining time prediction approaches in a real-life outbound warehouse process of a logistics company in the aviation business. For this process, the company provided us with a novel and original event log with 169,523 traces, which we can make publicly available. Unsurprisingly, we find that deep learning models achieve the highest accuracy, but shallow methods like conventional boosting techniques achieve competitive accuracy and require significantly fewer computational resources.

Predictive Process Monitoring (PPM) aims to forecast the future behavior of ongoing process instances using historical event data, enabling proactive decision-making. While recent advances rely heavily on deep learning models such as LSTMs and Transformers, their high computational cost hinders practical adoption. Prior work has explored data reduction techniques and alternative feature encodings, but the effect of simplifying model architectures themselves remains underex-plored. In this paper, we analyze how reducing model complexity--both in terms of parameter count and architectural depth--impacts predictive performance, using two established PPM approaches. Across five diverse event logs, we show that shrinking the Transformer model by 85% results in only a 2-3% drop in performance across various PPM tasks, while the LSTM proves slightly more sensitive, particularly for waiting time prediction. Overall, our findings suggest that substantial model simplification can preserve predictive accuracy, paving the way for more efficient and scalable PPM solutions.

Predictive process monitoring techniques support the operational decision-making by predicting future states of ongoing cases of a business process. A subset of these techniques predict the remaining sequence of activities of an ongoing case (case suffix prediction). Existing approaches for case suffix prediction generate sequences of activities with a single timestamp (e.g. the end timestamp). This output is insufficient for resource capacity planning, where we need to reason about the periods of time when resources will be busy performing work. This paper introduces a technique for predicting case suffixes consisting of activities with start and end timestamps. In other words, the proposed technique predicts both the waiting time and the processing time of each activity. Since the waiting time of an activity in a case depends on how busy resources are in other cases, the technique adopts a sweep-line approach, wherein the suffixes of all ongoing cases in the process are predicted in lockstep, rather than predictions being made for each case in isolation. An evaluation on real-life and synthetic datasets compares the accuracy of different instantiations of this approach, demonstrating the advantages of a multi-model approach to case suffix prediction.

Arrival time prediction (ATP) of public transport vehicles is essential in improving passenger experience and supporting traffic management. Deep learning has demonstrated outstanding performance in ATP due to its ability to model non-linear and temporal dynamics. In the multi-step ATP, non-stationary data will degrade the model performance due to the variation in variables' joint distribution along the temporal direction. Previous studies mainly applied normalization to eliminate the non-stationarity in time series, thereby achieving better predictability. However, the normalization may obscure useful characteristics inherent in non-stationarity, which is known as the over-stationarization. In this work, to trade off predictability and non-stationarity, a new approach for multi-step ATP, named non-stationary ATP ( NSATP), is proposed. The method consists of two stages: series stationarization and non-stationarity effect recovery. The first stage aims at improving the predictability. As for the latter, NSATP extends a state-of-the-art method from one-dimensional to two dimensional based models to capture the hidden periodicity in time series and designs a compensation module of over-stationarization by learning scaling and shifting factors from raw data. 125 days' public transport operational data of Dresden is collected for validation. Experimental results show that compared to baseline methods, the proposed NSATP can reduce RMSE, MAE, and MAPE by 2.37%, 1.22%, and 2.26% for trams and by 1.72%, 0.60%, and 1.17% for buses, respectively.

Non-emergency municipal services such as city 311 systems have been widely implemented across cities in Canada and the United States to enhance residents' quality of life. These systems enable residents to report issues, e.g., noise complaints, missed garbage collection, and potholes, via phone calls, mobile applications, or webpages. However, residents are often given limited information about when their service requests will be addressed, which can reduce transparency, lower resident satisfaction, and increase the number of follow-up inquiries. Predicting the service time for municipal service requests is challenging due to several complex factors: dynamic spatial-temporal correlations, underlying interactions among heterogeneous service request types, and high variation in service duration even within the same request category. In this work, we propose MuST2-Learn: a Multi-view Spatial-Temporal-Type Learning framework designed to address the aforementioned challenges by jointly modeling spatial, temporal, and service type dimensions. In detail, it incorporates an inter-type encoder to capture relationships among heterogeneous service request types and an intra-type variation encoder to model service time variation within homogeneous types. In addition, a spatiotemporal encoder is integrated to capture spatial and temporal correlations in each request type. The proposed framework is evaluated with extensive experiments using two real-world datasets. The results show that MuST2-Learn reduces mean absolute error by at least 32.5%, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Passenger waiting time prediction plays a critical role in enhancing both ridesharing user experience and platform efficiency. While most existing research focuses on post-request waiting time prediction with knowing the matched driver information, pre-request waiting time prediction (i.e., before submitting a ride request and without matching a driver) is also important, as it enables passengers to plan their trips more effectively and enhance the experience of both passengers and drivers. However, it has not been fully studied by existing works. In this paper, we take the first step toward understanding the predictability and explainability of pre-request passenger waiting time in ridesharing systems. Particularly, we conduct an in-depth data-driven study to investigate the impact of demand&supply dynamics on passenger waiting time. Based on this analysis and feature engineering, we propose FiXGBoost, a novel feature interaction-based XGBoost model designed to predict waiting time without knowing the assigned driver information. We further perform an importance analysis to quantify the contribution of each factor. Experiments on a large-scale real-world ridesharing dataset including over 30 million trip records show that our FiXGBoost can achieve a good performance for pre-request passenger waiting time prediction with high explainability.

Suffix prediction of business processes forecasts the remaining sequence of events until process completion. Current approaches focus on predicting the most likely suffix, representing a single scenario. However, when the future course of a process is subject to uncertainty and high variability, the expressiveness of such a single scenario can be limited, since other possible scenarios, which together may have a higher overall probability, are overlooked. To address this limitation, we propose probabilistic suffix prediction, a novel approach that approximates a probability distribution of suffixes. The proposed approach is based on an Uncertainty-Aware Encoder-Decoder LSTM (U-ED-LSTM) and a Monte Carlo (MC) suffix sampling algorithm. We capture epistemic uncertainties via MC dropout and aleatoric uncertainties as learned loss attenuation. This technical report presents a comprehensive evaluation of the probabilistic suffix prediction approach's predictive performance and calibration under three different hyperparameter settings, using four real-life and one artificial event log. The results show that: i) probabilistic suffix prediction can outperform most likely suffix prediction, the U-ED-LSTM has reasonable predictive performance, and ii) the model's predictions are well calibrated.