DEK-Forecaster: A Novel Deep Learning Model Integrated with EMD-KNN for
  Traffic Prediction
Sajal Saha Sudipto Baral Anwar Haque
Internet traffic volume estimation has a significant impact on the business
policies of the ISP (Internet Service Provider) industry and business
successions. Forecasting the internet traffic demand helps to shed light on the
future traffic trend, which is often helpful for ISPs decision-making in
network planning activities and investments. Besides, the capability to
understand future trend contributes to managing regular and long-term
operations. This study aims to predict the network traffic volume demand using
deep sequence methods that incorporate Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) based
noise reduction, Empirical rule based outlier detection, and $K$-Nearest
Neighbour (KNN) based outlier mitigation. In contrast to the former studies,
the proposed model does not rely on a particular EMD decomposed component
called Intrinsic Mode Function (IMF) for signal denoising. In our proposed
traffic prediction model, we used an average of all IMFs components for signal
denoising. Moreover, the abnormal data points are replaced by $K$ nearest data
points average, and the value for $K$ has been optimized based on the KNN
regressor prediction error measured in Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE). Finally,
we selected the best time-lagged feature subset for our prediction model based
on AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) and Akaike Information
Criterion (AIC) value. Our experiments are conducted on real-world internet
traffic datasets from industry, and the proposed method is compared with
various traditional deep sequence baseline models. Our results show that the
proposed EMD-KNN integrated prediction models outperform comparative models.