Runtime prediction models for Web-based system resources

Several activities of Web-based architectures are managed by algorithms that take runtime decisions on the basis of continuous information about the state of the internal system resources. The problem is that in this extremely dynamic context the observed data points are characterized by high variability, dispersion and noise at different time scales to the extent that existing models cannot guarantee accurate predictions at runtime. In this paper, we evaluate the predictability of the internal resource state and point out the necessity to filter the noise of raw data measures. We then verify that more accurate prediction models are required which take into account the non stationary effects of the data sets, the time series trends and the runtime constraints. To these purposes, we propose a new prediction model, called trend-aware regression. It is specifically designed to deal with on the fly and short-term forecast of time series which originate from filtered data points belonging to internal resources of Web system. The experiment evaluation for different workload scenarios shows that the proposed trend-aware regression model improves the prediction accuracy with respect to popular algorithms based on auto-regressive and linear models, while satisfying the computational constraints of runtime prediction.