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Main Authors: Guthula, Satyandra, Daneshamooz, Jaber, Fleming, Charles, Kundu, Ashish, Willinger, Walter, Gupta, Arpit
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22397
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author Guthula, Satyandra
Daneshamooz, Jaber
Fleming, Charles
Kundu, Ashish
Willinger, Walter
Gupta, Arpit
author_facet Guthula, Satyandra
Daneshamooz, Jaber
Fleming, Charles
Kundu, Ashish
Willinger, Walter
Gupta, Arpit
contents Forecasting on widely used benchmark time series data (e.g., ETT, Electricity, Taxi, and Exchange Rate, etc.) has favored smooth, seasonal series, but network telemetry time series -- traffic measurements at service, IP, or subnet granularity -- are instead highly bursty and intermittent, with heavy-tailed bursts and highly variable inactive periods. These properties place the latter in the statistical regimes made famous and popularized more than 20 years ago by B.~Mandelbrot. Yet forecasting such time series with modern-day AI architectures remains underexplored. We introduce NetBurst, an event-centric framework that reformulates forecasting as predicting when bursts occur and how large they are, using quantile-based codebooks and dual autoregressors. Across large-scale sets of production network telemetry time series and compared to strong baselines, such as Chronos, NetBurst reduces Mean Average Scaled Error (MASE) by 13--605x on service-level time series while preserving burstiness and producing embeddings that cluster 5x more cleanly than Chronos. In effect, our work highlights the benefits that modern AI can reap from leveraging Mandelbrot's pioneering studies for forecasting in bursty, intermittent, and heavy-tailed regimes, where its operational value for high-stakes decision making is of paramount interest.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_22397
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle NetBurst: Event-Centric Forecasting of Bursty, Intermittent Time Series
Guthula, Satyandra
Daneshamooz, Jaber
Fleming, Charles
Kundu, Ashish
Willinger, Walter
Gupta, Arpit
Networking and Internet Architecture
Machine Learning
Forecasting on widely used benchmark time series data (e.g., ETT, Electricity, Taxi, and Exchange Rate, etc.) has favored smooth, seasonal series, but network telemetry time series -- traffic measurements at service, IP, or subnet granularity -- are instead highly bursty and intermittent, with heavy-tailed bursts and highly variable inactive periods. These properties place the latter in the statistical regimes made famous and popularized more than 20 years ago by B.~Mandelbrot. Yet forecasting such time series with modern-day AI architectures remains underexplored. We introduce NetBurst, an event-centric framework that reformulates forecasting as predicting when bursts occur and how large they are, using quantile-based codebooks and dual autoregressors. Across large-scale sets of production network telemetry time series and compared to strong baselines, such as Chronos, NetBurst reduces Mean Average Scaled Error (MASE) by 13--605x on service-level time series while preserving burstiness and producing embeddings that cluster 5x more cleanly than Chronos. In effect, our work highlights the benefits that modern AI can reap from leveraging Mandelbrot's pioneering studies for forecasting in bursty, intermittent, and heavy-tailed regimes, where its operational value for high-stakes decision making is of paramount interest.
title NetBurst: Event-Centric Forecasting of Bursty, Intermittent Time Series
topic Networking and Internet Architecture
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22397