Telecommunication Traffic Forecasting via Multi-task Learning

Accurate telecommunication time series forecasting is critical for smart management systems of cellular networks, and has a special challenge in predicting different types of time series simultaneously at one base station (BS), e.g., the SMS, Calls, and Internet. Unlike the well-studied single target forecasting problem for one BS, this distributed multi-target forecasting problem should take advantage of both the intra-BS dependence of different types of time series at the same BS and the inter-BS dependence of time series at different BS. To this end, we first propose a model to learn the inter-BS dependence by aggregating the multi-view dependence, e.g., from the viewpoint of SMS, Calls, and Internet. To incorporate the interBS dependence in time series forecasting, we then propose a Graph Gate LSTM (GGLSTM) model that includes a graph-based gate mechanism to unite those base stations with a strong dependence on learning a collaboratively strengthened prediction model. We also extract the intra-BS dependence by an attention network and use it in the final prediction. Our proposed approach is evaluated on two real-world datasets. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in predicting multiple types of telecom traffic at the distributed base stations.