TR-GAN: Data-Augmentation-Aware Transformer-Rectification-Based Generative Adversarial Networks for Long-Term Cloud Workload Forecasting

Abstract

Maximum utilisation of minimal amount of resources is pivotal for achieving a sustainable operation in large-scale Cloud Data Centres. Prediction driven resource provisioning in Cloud Data Centres is a potential approach to execute Cloud workloads in a sustianable way. Traditional prediction models often struggle to deliver accurate predictions under dynamic and heterogeneous cloud workloads, as capturing long-range dependencies and sudden workload spikes is often challenging in Cloud environments. In addition, recent time series models such as the Adversarial Error Correction Generative Adversarial Network (AEC-GAN) characterise shortcomings when applied to cloud workload datasets, particularly whilst managing volatility and learning irregular patterns. To address such challenges, this paper proposes a novel prediction model using Data Augment Aware Transformer Rectification-based Generative Adversarial Networks (TR-GAN), which incorporates a continuous and conditional learning Transformer block in the GAN’s generator module to serve both as a data distribution moderator and as a data augmentation generator, ultimately to deliver accurate predictions. TR-GAN is the first GAN-based model tailored for long-term cloud workload forecasting that explicitly couples data augmentation with sequence rectification. Unlike discriminative forecasters, Its generative formulation allows it to model the intrinsic variability and uncertainty of cloud workloads,generate context-aware synthetic data to improve generalization under sparse or irregular patterns, and iteratively refine predictions through an adversarial learning process, thereby reducing error accumulation in long-horizon forecasts. The prediction performance of the proposed model is evaluated with two widely-used cloud workload datasets, namely the Google clusters and Alibaba traces. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed TR-GAN model can deliver a prediction improvement of around 15% than notable state-of-the-art models, including Informer, Autoformer and AEC-GAN, for long forecasting horizons.