Traffic Prediction From Temporal Graphs Using Representation Learning

Abstract: With the arrival of 5G networks, telecommunication systems are becoming more intelligent, integrated, and broadly used. This thesis focuses on predicting the upcoming traffic to efficiently promote resource allocation, guarantee stability and reliability of the network. Since networks modeled as graphs potentially capture more information than tabular data, the construction of the graph and choice of the model are key to achieve a good prediction. In this thesis traffic prediction is based on a time-evolving graph, whose node and edges encode the structure and activity of the system. Edges are created by dynamic time-warping (DTW), geographical distance, and $k$-nearest neighbors. The node features contain different temporal information together with spatial information computed by methods from topological data analysis (TDA). To capture the temporal and spatial dependency of the graph several dynamic graph methods are compared. Throughout experiments, we could observe that the most successful model GConvGRU performs best for edges created by DTW and node features that include temporal information across multiple time steps.