  Predictive analysis in business process monitoring aims at forecasting the
future information of a running business process. The prediction is typically
made based on the model extracted from historical process execution logs (event
logs). In practice, different business domains might require different kinds of
predictions. Hence, it is important to have a means for properly specifying the
desired prediction tasks, and a mechanism to deal with these various prediction
tasks. Although there have been many studies in this area, they mostly focus on
a specific prediction task. This work introduces a language for specifying the
desired prediction tasks, and this language allows us to express various kinds
of prediction tasks. This work also presents a mechanism for automatically
creating the corresponding prediction model based on the given specification.
Thus, different from previous studies, our approach enables us to deal with
various kinds of prediction tasks based on the given specification. A prototype
implementing our approach has been developed and experiments using a real-life
event log have been conducted.
