Enhanced edge convolution-based spatial-temporal network for network traffic prediction

Accurately predicting network traffic is helpful for improving a variety of spatial-temporal data mining applications, such as intelligent traffic control, network planning and anomaly detection. The mainstream graph-based methods are limited by the node-level message passing mechanism and require transforming dimensions to generate edge representations. Accordingly, some researchers propose using edge convolution to directly learn edge representations for network traffic prediction. However, node-level and edge-level information aggregation are two different perspectives, and their combination of them can achieve better performance. This paper proposes a novel model for network traffic prediction named the Enhanced Edge Convolution-based Spatial-Temporal Network (EESTN). Armed with a Graph Neural Network and Hypergraph Neural Network, EESTN employs the edge convolutions defined on the graph and hypergraph to effectively extract spatial features. EESTN further combines node convolution to capture the complex correlations among nodes and utilizes an attention mechanism to generate the edge convolution kernel for the decoder. Moreover, a 3D convolution-based multihead self-attention mechanism and a hierarchical loss function are proposed to capture the long-term temporal dependence and make full use of the model's represent ability. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of EESTN, and the related results demonstrate that EESTN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.