# FLEXIBLE: Forecasting Cellular Traffic by Leveraging Explicit Inductive Graph-Based Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.08843 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08843/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Neural Message Passing for Quantum Chemistry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01212/) (2017)
- [Optuna: A Next-generation Hyperparameter Optimization Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10902/) (2019)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks on Graphs with Fast Localized Spectral Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09375/) (2016)
- [WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03499/) (2016)
- [Connecting the Dots: Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11650/) (2020)
- [Adaptive Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02842/) (2020)
- [Domain Adversarial Spatial-Temporal Network: A Transferable Framework for Short-term Traffic Forecasting across Cities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03630/) (2022)
- [Transfer Learning with Graph Neural Networks for Short-Term Highway Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08038/) (2020)
- [The NetMob23 Dataset: A High-resolution Multi-region Service-level Mobile Data Traffic Cartography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06933/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

From a telecommunication standpoint, the surge in users and services challenges next-generation networks with escalating traffic demands and limited resources. Accurate traffic prediction can offer network operators valuable insights into network conditions and suggest optimal allocation policies. Recently, spatio-temporal forecasting, employing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), has emerged as a promising method for cellular traffic prediction. However, existing studies, inspired by road traffic forecasting formulations, overlook the dynamic deployment and removal of base stations, requiring the GNN-based forecaster to handle an evolving graph. This work introduces a novel inductive learning scheme and a generalizable GNN-based forecasting model that can process diverse graphs of cellular traffic with one-time training. We also demonstrate that this model can be easily leveraged by transfer learning with minimal effort, making it applicable to different areas. Experimental results show up to 9.8% performance improvement compared to the state-of-the-art, especially in rare-data settings with training data reduced to below 20%.