Deep Adversarial Tensor Completion for Accurate Network Traffic Measurement

Network trouble shooting, failure location, and anomaly detection rely heavily on network traffic measurement data. Due to the lack of measurement infrastructure, the high measurement cost, and the unavoidable transmission loss, network monitoring systems suffer from the problem that the network traffic data are incomplete. This article models the traffic data as a tensor to exploit its strong ability of feature extraction to recover the missing data. Different from traditional tensor completion which relies on tensor factorization, we design a novel Deep Adversarial Tensor Completion (DATC) scheme based on Deep Learning (DL) techniques. DATC is the first scheme that exploits the data reconstruction ability of autoencoder and the power of adversarial training from Generative Adversarial Networks to infer the missing data. Despite that DL techniques achieve great success in the image field, designing an algorithm based on DL techniques to recover the traffic data with missing entries faces additional challenges due to the skewed distribution and the sparsity of traffic data. To conquer these challenges, we propose the use of two techniques, adversarial training and missing data aware convolution. These techniques help DATC to learn the complex features of the traffic data and infer the missing data following the data distribution of traffic data. Our extensive experimental results using two public real-world network traffic datasets and running both offline and online demonstrate that DATC can achieve significantly better recovery accuracy while capturing the data distribution of the traffic data even when the sampling ratio is very low.