A Multivariate Cloud Workload Prediction Method Integrating Convolutional Nonlinear Spiking Neural Model with Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory

Multivariate workload prediction in cloud computing environments is a critical research problem. Effectively capturing inter-variable correlations and temporal patterns in multivariate time series is key to addressing this challenge. To address this issue, this paper proposes a convolutional model based on a Nonlinear Spiking Neural P System (ConvNSNP), which enhances the ability to process nonlinear data compared to conventional convolutional models. Building upon this, a hybrid forecasting model is developed by integrating ConvNSNP with a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) network. ConvNSNP is first employed to extract temporal and cross-variable dependencies from the multivariate time series, followed by BiLSTM to further strengthen long-term temporal modeling. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on three public cloud workload traces from Alibaba and Google. The proposed model is compared with a range of established deep learning approaches, including CNN, RNN, LSTM, TCN and hybrid models such as LSTNet, CNN-GRU and CNN-LSTM. Experimental results on three public datasets demonstrate that our proposed model achieves up to 9.9% improvement in RMSE and 11.6% improvement in MAE compared with the most effective baseline methods. The model also achieves favorable performance in terms of MAPE, further validating its effectiveness in multivariate workload prediction.