Forecasting wireless demand with extreme values using feature embedding in Gaussian processes

Wireless traffic prediction is a fundamental enabler to proactive network optimisation in 5G and beyond. Forecasting extreme demand spikes and troughs is essential to avoiding outages and improving energy efficiency. However, current forecasting methods predominantly focus on overall forecast performance and/or do not offer probabilistic uncertainty quantification. Here, we design a feature embedding (FE) kernel for a Gaussian Process (GP) model to forecast traffic demand. The FE kernel enables us to trade-off overall forecast accuracy against peak-trough accuracy. Using real 4G base station data, we compare its performance against both conventional GPs, ARIMA models, as well as demonstrate the uncertainty quantification output. The advantage over neural network (e.g. CNN, LSTM) models is that the probabilistic forecast uncertainty can directly feed into decision processes in optimisation modules.