Completing and Predicting Internet Traffic Matrices Using Adversarial Autoencoders and Hidden Markov Models

Internet traffic matrices are used nowadays for a variety of network management operations, from planning to repairing. Despite years of research on the topic, obtaining a global view of traffic is still challenging and error-prone. Due to flaws in the measurement systems and possible failure in data collection tools, missing values are unavoidable. It is thus helpful for many network operators to recover the missing data from the partial direct measurements. While some existing matrix completion methods allowed this reconstruction, they do not fully consider network traffic behavior and hidden traffic characteristics, showing the inability to adapt to multiple scenarios. Others instead make assumptions about the matrix structure that may be invalid or impractical, curtailing the applicability. In this paper, we propose Hide & Seek, a novel matrix completion and prediction algorithm based on a combination of generative autoencoders and Hidden Markov Models. After an extensive experimental evaluation based on both real-world datasets and on a testbed, we demonstrated how our algorithm can accurately reconstruct missing values while also predicting their short-term evolution.