Network traffic prediction model based on improved VMD and PSO‐ELM

Summary The rapid update of computing power leads to exponential data traffic growth, and the incidence of network attacks is also increasing. It is significantly important to analyze and predict network traffic accurately in the early stage and take corresponding preventive measures. The existing network flow integrated forecasting models still have some bottlenecks that are difficult to solve, for example, the slow optimization speed of modal decomposition parameters, easy falling into local optimal solutions, the slow convergence speed of the training process, and poor generalization capability. In this paper, particle swarm optimization (PSO) is utilized to improve the parameters selection process of the variational mode decomposition (VMD) algorithm and the extreme learning machine (ELM) algorithm. First, the PSO‐VMD combined with multi‐scale permutation entropy (MPE) is utilized to decompose the original network flow, and multiple eigenmode components are obtained. Second, the PSO‐ELM is utilized to train the network traffic prediction model, and the PSO parameters in PSO‐ELM are updated through adaptive weight adjustment and synchronous learning factors to increase the training and prediction speed, and the component prediction results are reconstructed to get a high‐precision network flow forecasting result. Finally, through the prediction and verification of the public network flow data of the WIDE backbone, the result of this experiment indicates that the VMD‐PSO‐ELM can break through the bottlenecks of slow optimization speed of VMD decomposition parameters, reduce the computational complexity of ELM, accelerate the convergence speed, and increase the forecasting accuracy.