Predicting Distributions of Waiting Times in Customer Service Systems using Mixture Density Networks

Abstract

Motivated by interest in providing more efficient services in customer service systems, we use statistical learning methods and delay history information to predict the conditional distribution of the customers’ waiting times in queueing systems. From the predicted distributions, descriptive statistics of the system such as mean, variance and percentiles of the waiting times can be obtained, which can be used for delay announcements, SLA conformance and better system management. We model the distributions by mixtures of Gaussians, parameters of which can be estimated using Mixture Density Networks. We use the extensions of the Lindley’s equation for multi-server queues to generate our datasets. The evaluations show that exploiting more delay history information can result in much more accurate predictions under realistic time-varying arrival assumptions.