Comparative Analysis of Attention Mechanisms in Densely Connected Network for Network Traffic Prediction

Recently, STDenseNet (SpatioTemporal Densely connected convolutional Network) showed remarkable performance in predicting network traffic by leveraging the inductive bias of convolution layers. However, it is known that such convolution layers can only barely capture long-term spatial and temporal dependencies. To solve this problem, we propose Attention-DenseNet (ADNet), which effectively incorporates an attention module into STDenseNet to learn representations for long-term spatio-temporal patterns. Specifically, we explored the optimal positions and the types of attention modules in combination with STDenseNet. Our key findings are as follows: i) attention modules are very effective when positioned between the last dense module and the final feature fusion module, meaning that the attention module plays a key role in aggregating low-level local features with long-term dependency. Hence, the final feature fusion module can easily exploit both global and local information; ii) the best attention module is different depending on the spatio-temporal characteristics of the dataset. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed ADNet, we performed experiments on the Telecom Italia dataset, a well-known benchmark dataset for network traffic prediction. The experimental results show that, compared to STDenseNet, our ADNet improved RMSE performance by 3.72%, 2.84%, and 5.87% in call service (Call), short message service (SMS), and Internet access (Internet) sub-datasets, respectively.