Deep Transfer Learning Across Cities for Mobile Traffic Prediction

Precise citywide mobile traffic prediction is of great significance for intelligent network planning and proactive service provisioning. Current traffic prediction approaches mainly focus on training a well-performed model for the cities with a large amount of mobile traffic data. However, for the cities with scarce data, the prediction performance will be greatly limited. To tackle this problem, in this paper we propose a novel cross-city deep transfer learning framework named CCTP for citywide mobile traffic prediction in cities with data scarcity. Specifically, we first present a novel spatial-temporal learning model and pre-train the model by abundant data of a source city to obtain prior knowledge of mobile traffic dynamics. We then devise an efficient generative adversarial network (GAN) based cross-domain adapter for distribution alignment between target data and source data. To deal with data scarcity issue in some clusters of target city, we further design an inter-cluster transfer learning strategy for performance enhancement. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world mobile traffic datasets demonstrate that our proposed CCTP framework can achieve superior performance in citywide mobile traffic prediction with data scarcity.