Understanding Network Traffic States using Transfer Learning

Large-scale network traffic analysis is crucial for many transport applications, ranging from estimation and prediction to control and planning. One of the key issues is how to integrate spatial and temporal analyses efficiently. Deep Learning is gaining momentum as a go-to approach for artificial vision, and transfer learning approaches allow to exploit pretrained models and apply them to new domains. In this paper, we encode traffic states as images and use a pretrained deep convolutional neural network as a feature extractor. Experimental results show how the extracted feature vectors cluster naturally into meaningful network traffic states and illustrate how these network states can be used for traffic state prediction.