Prediction of telephone calls load using Echo State Network with exogenous variables.

Journal: Neural networks : the official journal of the International Neural Network Society
Published Date:

Abstract

We approach the problem of forecasting the load of incoming calls in a cell of a mobile network using Echo State Networks. With respect to previous approaches to the problem, we consider the inclusion of additional telephone records regarding the activity registered in the cell as exogenous variables, by investigating their usefulness in the forecasting task. Additionally, we analyze different methodologies for training the readout of the network, including two novel variants, namely ν-SVR and an elastic net penalty. Finally, we employ a genetic algorithm for both the tasks of tuning the parameters of the system and for selecting the optimal subset of most informative additional time-series to be considered as external inputs in the forecasting problem. We compare the performances with standard prediction models and we evaluate the results according to the specific properties of the considered time-series.

Authors

  • Filippo Maria Bianchi
    Department of Information Engineering, Electronics and Telecommunications (DIET), "Sapienza" University of Rome, Via Eudossiana 18, 00184 Rome, Italy. Electronic address: filippomaria.bianchi@uniroma1.it.
  • Simone Scardapane
    Department of Information Engineering, Electronics and Telecommunications (DIET), "Sapienza" University of Rome, Via Eudossiana 18, 00184 Rome, Italy.
  • Aurelio Uncini
    Department of Information Engineering, Electronics and Telecommunications (DIET), "Sapienza" University of Rome, Via Eudossiana 18, 00184 Rome, Italy.
  • Antonello Rizzi
    Department of Information Engineering, Electronics and Telecommunications (DIET), "Sapienza" University of Rome, Via Eudossiana 18, 00184 Rome, Italy. Electronic address: antonello.rizzi@uniroma1.it.
  • Alireza Sadeghian
    Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, ON, Canada.