Internet Traffic Prediction by W-Boost: Classification and Regression

Internet traffic prediction plays a fundamental role in network design, management, control, and optimization. The self-similar and non-linear nature of network traffic makes highly accurate prediction difficult. In this paper, we proposed a new boosting scheme, namely W-Boost, for traffic prediction from two perspectives: classification and regression. To capture the nonlinearity of the traffic while introducing low complexity into the algorithm, ‘stump’ and piece-wise-constant function are adopted as weak learners for classification and regression, respectively. Furthermore, a new weight update scheme is proposed to take the advantage of the correlation information within the traffic for both models. Experimental results on real network traffic which exhibits both self-similarity and non-linearity demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed W-Boost.