IPOC: An Adaptive Interval Prediction Model based on Online Chasing and Conformal Inference for Large-Scale Systems

In large-scale systems, due to system complexity and demand volatility, diverse and dynamic workloads make accurate predictions difficult. In this work, we address an online interval prediction problem (OnPred-Int) and adopt ensemble learning to solve it. We depict that the ensemble learning for OnPred-Int is a dynamic deterministic Markov Decision Process (Dd-MDP) and convert it into a stateful online learning task. Then we propose IPOC, a lightweight and flexible model able to produce effective confidence intervals, adapting the dynamics of real-time workload streams. At each time, IPOC selects a target model and executes chasing for it by a designed chasing oracle, during which process IPOC produces accurate confidence intervals. The effectiveness of IPOC is theoretically validated through sublinear regret analysis and satisfaction of confidence interval requirements. Besides, we conduct extensive experiments on 4 real-world datasets comparing with 19 baselines. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to apply the frontier theory of online learning to time series prediction tasks.