Comparative evaluation of encoding techniques for workflow process remaining time prediction for cloud applications

With the increasing adoption of cloud infrastructure for workflow process deployment, the workflow process remaining time prediction has received more attention due to its significance in improving response time and optimizing resource allocation. Event encoding techniques, by capturing the temporal dynamics and contextual dependencies of process events, improve the accuracy of workflow process remaining time predictions. However, there remains a lack of comprehensive empirical evaluation to analyze the impact of various event encoding techniques on prediction accuracy. To fill this gap, this paper conducts an extensive experimental evaluation of five state-of-the-art event encoding techniques, including One-Hot, Skip-Gram, CBOW (Continuous Bag-of-Word), FastText and GloVe, across nine prediction models based on LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory), GRU (Gated Recurrent Unit), and QRNN (Quasi-Recurrent Neural Network). The evaluation utilizes eight real-world event logs to assess the accuracy of workflow remaining time predictions. The experimental results demonstrate that the GloVe encoding technique consistently yields superior ...