Hypergraph Attention Recurrent Network for Cellular Traffic Prediction

Cellular traffic prediction provides significant support for the management of intelligent networks. Existing models commonly combine recurrent neural networks (RNNs) with attention mechanisms, convolutional neural networks (CNNs), or graph convolutional networks (GCNs) to capture spatial-temporal correlations of cellular traffic. However, attention mechanisms lack sensitivity to local information; CNNs ignore the interaction among distant regions with similar semantics; GCNs exhibit limitations in exploring high-order (beyond pairwise) spatial correlations. To this end, we develop a hypergraph attention recurrent network (HARN) that exploits locality, semantics, and high-order correlations for cellular traffic prediction. Specifically, we first propose a spatial trend-aware attention to perceive local trends, thus easing the mismatching problem of attention mechanisms. Then, we construct a hypergraph to characterize the interactions between distant regions with similar semantics, and leverage a hypergraph convolution network to extract high-order correlations. More importantly, to extract heterogeneous and varying spatial patterns, we further enhance the hypergraph convolution network by incorporating spatial-temporal representations. Last, extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of HARN over state-of-the-art baselines in terms of mean absolute error and root mean square error, with specific improvements of 1.83% and 5.79% on SMS (short message service) dataset, 3.05% and 11.27% on Call dataset, and 1.36% and 1.65% on Internet dataset, respectively.