Accurate Analysis and Prediction of Enterprise Service-Level Performance

Abstract

An enterprise service-level performance time series is a sequence of data points that quantify demand, throughput, average order-delivery time, quality of service, or end-to-end cost. Analytical and predictive models of such time series can be embedded into an enterprise information system (EIS) in order to provide meaningful insights into potential business problems and generate guidance for appropriate solutions. Time-series analysis includes periodicity detection, decomposition, and correlation analysis. Time-series prediction can be modeled as a regression problem to forecast a sequence of future time-series datapoints based on the given time series. The state-of-the-art (baseline) methods employed in time-series prediction generally apply advanced machine-learning algorithms. In this article, we propose a new univariate method for dealing with midterm time-series prediction. The proposed method first analyzes the hierarchical periodic structure in one time series and decomposes it into trend, season, and noise components. By discarding the noise component, the proposed method only focuses on predicting repetitive season and smoothed trend components. As a result, this method significantly improves upon the performance of baseline methods in midterm time-series prediction. Moreover, we propose a new multivariate method for dealing with short-term time-series prediction. The proposed method utilizes cross-correlation information derived from multiple time series. The amount of data taken from each time series for training the regression model is determined by results from hierarchical cross-correlation analysis. Such a data-filtering strategy leads to improved algorithm efficiency and prediction accuracy. By combining statistical methods with advanced machine-learning algorithms, we have achieved a significantly superior performance in both short-term and midterm time-series predictions compared to state-of-the-art (baseline) methods.