Embodiments include predicting transactions by an entity and identifying promotions to offer the entity. Aspects include parsing a plurality of event records corresponding to a plurality of entities respectively. Aspects also include identifying a sequence of events corresponding to the entity and discretizing time durations and event values of the sequence of events into discrete symbolic values. Aspects further include generating a temporal pattern of events in the sequence of events, the temporal pattern including a sequence of transaction-symbols representative of the time duration and the event value of the events in the sequence of events of the entity and predicting a next transaction based on the temporal pattern.