Data-Driven User Complaint Prediction for Mobile Access Networks

In this paper, we present a user-complaint prediction system for mobile access networks based on network monitoring data. By applying machine-learning models, the proposed system can relate user complaints to network performance indicators, alarm reports in a data-driven fashion, and predict the complaint events in a fine-grained spatial area within a specific time window. The proposed system harnesses several special designs to deal with the specialty in complaint prediction; complaint bursts are extracted using linear filtering and threshold detection to reduce the noisy fluctuation in raw complaint events. A fuzzy gridding method is also proposed to resolve the inaccuracy in verbally described complaint locations. Furthermore, we combine up-sampling with down-sampling to combat the severe skewness towards negative samples. The proposed system is evaluated using a real dataset collected from a major Chinese mobile operator, in which, events due to complaint bursts account approximately for only 0.3% of all recorded events. Results show that our system can detect 30% of complaint bursts 3 h ahead with more than 80% precision. This will achieve a corresponding proportion of quality of experience improvement if all predicted complaint events can be handled in advance through proper network maintenance.