2022 Tenth International Conference on Advanced Cloud and Big Data (CBD)

Research on Cloud Computing load forecasting based

on LSTM-ARIMA combined model
2022 Tenth International Conference on Advanced Cloud and Big Data (CBD) | 979-8-3503-0971-3/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/CBD58033.2022.00013

Xiaomin Liu Xiaolan Xie* Qiang Guo

Guangxi Key Laboratory of
Embedded Technology and
Intelligent System
Guilin University of Technology
Guilin,China
1378167510@qq.com
Guangxi Key Laboratory of
Embedded Technology and
Intelligent System
Guilin University of Technology
Guilin,China
xie_xiao_lan@foxmail.com
Guangxi Key Laboratory of
Embedded Technology and
Intelligent System
Guilin University of Technology
Guilin,China
guoqiang121@163.com

Abstract—With the continuous development of cloud
computing technology, the change of cloud computing resource
load presents more and more complex characteristics, and
efficient load prediction has become a key technology to solve the
imbalance of cloud computing resource utilization. Aiming at the
problem of low prediction performance of the current load
prediction model, a combined prediction model LSAR based on
long short-term memory network LSTM and autoregressive
moving average model ARIMA is proposed by comprehensively
considering the factors of prediction accuracy and prediction time.
Compared with the traditional load prediction models ARIMA
and LSTM, the open data set was used for the experiment. The
experimental results show that the prediction accuracy of the
cloud computing resource combination prediction model is
significantly higher than that of other prediction models, and the
real-time prediction error of resource load in the cloud
environment is significantly reduced.
Keywords—cloud computing, load forecasting, combined
forecasting model, long short-term memory network (LSTM)
I. INTRODUCTION
With the advent of the cloud computing era, more and more
companies have migrated their applications to the cloud
computing platform. Cloud computing uses virtualization
technology to integrate discrete resources into resource pools,
and realizes user-to-computing in an on-demand manner. Elastic
requirements of resources. The essence of cloud computing is to
provide services on demand to realize automatic allocation and
switching of application resources on the cloud platform. To
achieve dynamic scaling of computing power, load balancing
technology is required. Cloud computing platforms use load
balancing technology to increase processing capacity , which
strengthens data processing capabilities. Load is a key indicator
required to achieve load balancing. Accurately predicting
application load can achieve peak traffic expansion and traffic
shrinking of application capacity, thereby saving resource costs,
reducing manual intervention, and improving cloud computing
platforms. reliability and performance.
At present, load forecasting models can be mainly divided
into two categories: single forecasting models and combined
forecasting models based on ensemble learning. Yan et al. [1]
used the integrated moving average autoregression model (auto-
regression and moving average model, ARIMA) algorithm to
perform software The prediction of the resource consumption of
the system is carried out by comparing the prediction effect of
the ARIMA algorithm, the support vector machine and the
artificial neural network in different scenarios. Calheiros et al. [2]
designed a cloud platform workload prediction module based on
the ARIMA algorithm, and actively configures dynamic
resources based on the prediction data of the model, which can
ensure the user's application service quality with as little
resource cost as possible. Shetty et al. [3] used multi-model
fusion to predict the load of cloud computing resources. The
experiment divided the load data set into training set and test set,
and used exponential smoothing, ARIMA, neural network and
other prediction models to calculate the average of the training
set. Based on the square error, the prediction results obtained
from the test set are divided into weights, and finally the
combined prediction value is obtained. Prassanna et al. [4] used
the HoltWinters algorithm to predict the workload of the cloud
environment. The mentioned algorithm can fit the historical time
series trend curve by establishing a mathematical model. It is
prone to the problem that the parameters are difficult to confirm.
The parameters are set by their own experience, so the final
accuracy of the model is greatly affected by the parameters. At
the same time, it is difficult for the model to learn the complex
laws inside the time series data. Zhang et al. [5] used the
Recursive Neural Network (RNN) to predict cloud workloads,
and verified the accuracy of the method through experiments on
the Google Cloud Trace dataset. Babu et al. [6] adopted the
combined forecasting model of ARIMA-ANN to perform linear
and nonlinear forecasting on time series data, respectively, and
combine the final results. The experimental results show that the
mixed models have higher prediction accuracy.
At present, there are various services running in cloud
computing nodes, and the resource requirements of various
services are also different.The load time series data usually has
a combination of linear and nonlinear characteristics during the
operation. Most of the existing prediction models use a single
prediction model, or use the prediction results of multiple

The work was supported by The National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.62262011) and The Natural Science Foundation of Guangxi
˄No.2021JJA170130˅

979-8-3503-0971-3/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE 19

DOI 10.1109/CBD58033.2022.00013
Authorized licensed use limited to: PES University Bengaluru. Downloaded on March 04,2024 at 17:22:28 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
different prediction models to integrate weights to obtain the
final prediction value. The above two models have different
degrees of improvement in the prediction accuracy, but there is
no fundamental solution to the problem.The impact of a poor
model on the final result. Therefore, this paper proposes a new
prediction model LSAR by combining LSTM [7] and ARIMA[8].
Firstly, LSTM prediction model and ARIMA prediction model
are used to predict the future workload. Secondly, the objective
weighting method is used to accumulate the prediction results of
the two prediction models to get the combined prediction value.
II. PROBLEM DESCRIPTION
This paper mainly focuses on the load prediction problem of
host resources in the cloud environment Assume that the original
resource sequence of cloud computing is L = {l1,l2,···lt},where lt
is the load of the cluster at time .Select the data at m times from
L as the input vector of the prediction model M = ˄lt-m+1,···,lt-
1,lt˅.The so-called load prediction is to predict the cluster load
at time t+1 through the input vector M.
The workload in the cloud environment has a certain
dependency, and the load situation at each moment is very
closely related to the previous load situation. When the historical
value is closer to the current time t, the relationship between
them is closer. At the same time, the deployment in the cloud
computing environment is becoming more and more complex,
and the load time series is neither purely linear nor nonlinear,
and generally includes a combination of two structures.
Although the single forecasting model is better than the
combined forecasting model in forecasting time, the forecasting
accuracy is significantly lower than that of the combined
forecasting model, and it has certain limitations in capturing
complex load time series patterns. The prediction performance
is more stable. Moreover, some poor single prediction models
will affect the final results. This paper proposes the idea of error
correction on the basis of combined prediction, which further
improves the accuracy of load prediction.
III. LOAD PREDICTION MODEL
3.1 Load Model
The so-called load is a description of the working state of
the server, which reflects the pressure of the current server task
processing. This paper mainly considers the impact of two
factors of memory usage on the cluster load. By adopting a
dynamic load prediction model, the influence of these two
factors on the load under different resource requirements is fully
considered. The load calculation in a single node is shown in
equations (1) and (2):
L WmLm  WcpuLcpu ˄1˅
Wm  Wcpu 1 ˄2˅
Where L refers to the load calculation value of a virtual host
in the computer cluster LmǃLcpu are memory usage and CPU
usage,WmǃWcpu are the weight coefficients of memory usage
and CPU usage, respectively.
20
Authorized licensed use limited to: PES University Bengaluru. Downloaded on March 04,2024 at 17:22:28 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
3.2 ARIMA prediction model
ARIMA can be used to forecast time series and is often used
in demand forecasting. The ARIMA model is a comprehensive
model that includes both the autoregressive AR (Auto
Regressive) model and the moving average MA (Moving
Average) model in the time series model. Among them, d is the
difference order, which is the number of differences to obtain
the stationary time series; p is the autoregressive term; q is the
corresponding moving average term. The basic formula of
ARIMA is shown in formula (3):
p q
Lt ¦ Mi Lt i  H t  ¦ T jH t  j
i 1 j 1
˄3˅
where Lt is the cluster load value at time t;¶ǃ© are the
autoregressive (AR) parameter and the moving average (MA)
parameter, respectively.;p is the order of the autoregressive
model;q is the moving average model order;¦ is the residual
sequence.
3.3 LSTM prediction model
Long Short-Term Memory Networks (LSTMs) are variants
of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). RNN is prone to the
problem of gradient explosion or disappearance. LSTM
introduces a new internal state ct for linear cyclic information
transmission, and introduces a gate mechanism to control the
path of information transmission, namely input gate it, forget
gate ft and Output gate ot. The calculation methods of 3 gates,
cell memory states, and hidden layers are as follows:
it V (Zixt  uiht  1  bi ) ˄4˅
ft V (Z fxt  ufht  1  bf ) ˄5˅
ot V (Z oxt  uoht  1  bo) ˄6˅
ct ft ct  1  it tanh((Zixt  ucht  1  bc ) ˄7˅
ta
ht ot tanh˄ct˅ ˄8˅
Where σ() is the logistic function, its output interval is (0,1),
Ĵ is the product of vector elements, tanh() is the activation
function, and xt is the input at the current moment,ht-1 and ht are
the external state at the previous moment and the current
moment, respectively,¹ *ǃu* and b* are the learned network
parameters.
The calculation process of the LSTM cyclic unit is: using the
external state ht-1 at the previous moment and the input xt at the
current moment, the states of the three gates and the candidate
states can be calculated according to formulas (5)~(8).After this,
the memory cell ct is updated by combining the forget gate ft and
the input gate it. Finally, combined with the output gate ot, the
information of the internal state is passed to the external state ht.
 3.4 Evaluation Criteria for Prediction Models
Time series data
This paper uses mean absolute error (MAE), mean absolute
percentage error (MAPE), mean square error (MSE), root mean
square error (RMASE) and coefficient of determination (R2) to
evaluate the prediction results. The calculation methods are as
follows: Formulas (9)~(13) are shown:

1 n
MAE ¦ | yi yˆi |
ni1
ARIMA load forecasting LSTM load prediction
˄9˅ model model

1 n yi  yˆ i
MAPE ¦|
n i 1 yi
|
˄10˅
Predicted load value Predicted load value
1 n
MSE ¦
ni1
( yi  yˆi ) 2
˄11˅

1 n
RMSE ¦ ( yi  yˆi)2
ni1 ˄12˅
n

¦ ( y  yˆ ) 2
CRITIC Data Fusion
i i

R2 1 i 1
n

¦ ( y  y)
i 1
i
2

˄13˅
Combined predicted value

where n is the number of load predictions,yi is the actual load

value,ŷi is the predicted load value,Cyi is the load average.
Figure 1 Combined forecasting mode
3.5 Combined prediction model based on ensemble
learning
The forecasting steps based on the combined forecasting
Considering that the ARIMA forecasting model is not model are as follows:
accurate enough for nonlinear time series fitting, and the simple
1) Time series load data acquisition. According to
neural network is not sufficient for linear and nonlinear
processing performance, this paper proposes a combined equations (1) to (3), considering that the cluster service in
forecasting model based on LSTM and ARIMA . The specific actual production takes 3 to 5 minutes from creation to
model as shown in Figure 1. deployment, the cloud computing cluster load time series data
set with a time interval of 5 minutes and a length of n is
collected LT={l1,l2,···,ln}.
2) LT is used to train the ARIMA prediction model and
LSTM load prediction model, namely, Equations (4) ~ (8),
Therefore, the ARIMA predicted load LPA ={lPA PA
1 ,···,lm } and LSTM
P PL PL
predicted load LL ={l1 ,···,lm } at m moments in the future are
obtained.L TA ={l TA TA TA T TL TL TL
1 ,l 2 ,···,l m } and L L ={l 1 ,l 2 ,···,l m } were

predicted by using the two prediction models after training LT.

3) Obtain the combined predicted value using CRITIC
objective weight method.Firstly, the absolute mean percentage
error (MAPE), absolute mean error (MAE), mean error (MSE),
root mean square error (RMSE), standard deviation (SE) and
relative standard deviation (RSD) of ARIMA and LSTM were
calculated according to LTA , LTL and LT.

21

Authorized licensed use limited to: PES University Bengaluru. Downloaded on March 04,2024 at 17:22:28 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND ANALYSIS TABLE I. COMPARISON OF PREDICTION PERFORMANCE

濣瀅濸濷濼濶瀇濼瀂瀁澳 濘瀉濴濿瀈濴瀇濼瀂瀁澳瀆瀇濴瀁濷濴瀅濷澳
濅
4.1 Experimental data 瀀瀂濷濸濿澳 濠濔濘澳 濠濔濣濘澳 濠濦濘澳 濥濠濦濘澳 濥澳
In order to verify the validity of the cloud computing 濔濥濜濠濔澳 濅濁濆濊濄濉澳 濃濁濃濌濈濈澳 濌濁濋濌濊濄澳 濆濁濄濇濉澳 濃濁濉濃濋濋澳
resource load prediction model proposed in this paper, the public 澳
data set provided by The Grid Workloads Archive website is 濟濦濧濠澳 濄濁濉濄濋濉澳 濃濁濃濉濊濅澳 濈濁濅濃濆濄澳 濅濁濅濋濄濄澳 濃濁濊濉濇濇澳
used to verify it experimentally. Using the load time series data 澳
provided by Materna, the data set records a grid workload every 濟濦濔濥澳 濃濁濌濉濅濉澳 濃濁濃濆濋濄澳 濅濁濇濌濊濇澳 濄濁濈濋濃濇澳 濃濁濌濉濃濊澳
5 minutes.
4.2 Analysis of experimental results
In order to test and evaluate the performance of the load From the figure, all models and the original sequence are
prediction model (LSAR) proposed in this paper, the original basically consistent in trend. However, from the perspective of
data TEST is compared with the single model ARIMA and prediction accuracy, the single load prediction model ARIMA
LSTM, and it is also compared with the combined model and LSTM are obviously inferior to the combined prediction
LSTM-ARIMA(LSAR). model LSAR. Compared with the traditional load prediction
model, the load prediction model LSAR proposed in this paper
The actual workload value in November 2010 was selected has a great improvement in accuracy. At the same time, it can be
from the data set, and the weights of CPU utilization and seen from the experimental results that the LSAR model
memory utilization were set to 0.4 and 0.6 respectively by proposed in this paper has high accuracy, and the error has been
analyzing the load data, and a piece of data was obtained every further corrected on the basis of the combined prediction model,
5 minutes, totaling 18,800 pieces of data. The first 70% of the which can further ensure the accuracy of the prediction data.
data is selected as the training set, 20% of the data is used as the
single-step test set, and the remaining data is used to verify the The load prediction of cloud computing resources mainly
generalization ability of the model. The results before and after refers to the changes in the load of cloud computing resources
model load prediction are shown in Figure 2, and Table1 gives for a period of time in the future. And from the prediction results,
the prediction error indicators of each model. the model proposed in this paper can not only accurately predict
the cloud computing resource load, but also the prediction model
has a certain generalization ability.

V. CONCLUSION

In order to deal with the complex and changing cloud

computing load time series data, this paper considers the impact
of CPU and memory on the load at the same time, and proposes
a combined prediction model LSAR based on the long short-
term memory network LSTM and the autoregressive moving
average model ARIMA. Firstly, ARIMA and LSTM prediction
models are used for prediction, and then the objective weighting
method is used to combine the prediction results to get the final
prediction results.The results of using public datasets show that
the prediction model in this paper has better prediction accuracy
and generalization ability, can more accurately predict the
changing trend of cloud computing center load, and can
effectively improve the network resource utilization of cloud
computing center.
Figure 2 Experimental comparison between different models

22

Authorized licensed use limited to: PES University Bengaluru. Downloaded on March 04,2024 at 17:22:28 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 REFERENCES

[1] YAN Y Q, GUO P. Predicting resource consumption in a Web server

using ARIMA model [J]. Journal of Beijing Institute of Technology, 2014,
23(4): 502–510. [1]
[2] CALHEIROS R N, MASOUMI E, RANJAN R, et al. Workload
prediction using ARIMA model and its impact on cloud applications' QoS
[J]. IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, 2014, 3(4): 449–458.
[3] Shetty J, Shobha G. An ensemble of automatic algorithms for forecasting
resource utilization in cloud[C]//Proc of 2016 Future Technologies
Conference (F TC) ,2016:301-306.
[4] PRASSANNA J, VENKATARAMAN N. Adaptive regressive holt –
winters workload prediction and firefly optimized lottery scheduling for
load balancing in cloud [J]. Wireless Networks, 2019: 1–19.
[5] Zhang W,Li B,Zhao D,et al. Workload prediction for cloud cluster using
a recurrent neural network[C]// Proc of 2016 International Conference on
Identification, Information and Knowledge in the Internet of Things
(IIKI) ,2016:104-109.
[6] Babu C N,Reddy B E. A moving average filter based hybrid ARIMA
ANN model for forecasting time series data [J].Applied Soft
Computing ,2014,23:27-38.
[7] Sudhakar C, Kumar A R, Siddartha N,et al. Workload predic-tion using
ARIMA statistical model and long short term memory recurrent neural
networks[C]// Proc of 2018 Inter-national Conference on Computing,
Power and Communica-tion Technologies (GUCON) ,2018: 600-604.
[8] NAZARIPOUYA H, WANG Y B, CHU C C, et al. Univa-riate time
series prediction of solar power using a hybrid wavelet- ARMA- NARX
prediction method [C] // 2016 .IEEE/PES Transmission and Distribution
ConferenceandExposition(T&D).IEEE,2016:DOI:10.1109/TDC.2016.75
19959.
[9] Diakoulaki D, Mavrotas G, Papayannakis L. Determining ob-jective
weights in multiple criteria problems: The critic method[ J ]. Computers
&. Operations Research, 1995, 22(7) : 763-770.
[10] Yang Teng-fei, Shi Kun,Wang Qrsheng. Two objective weighting
methods and their application in determining com-bined prediction
weights [J] . Surveying and Mapping Engineering,2014,23(7):59-61. (in
Chinese)

23

Authorized licensed use limited to: PES University Bengaluru. Downloaded on March 04,2024 at 17:22:28 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.