What's on in Computing Science?

Date: Friday, 22 October, 2010
Time: 11:00
Location: Sir Alwyn Williams Building, 422 Seminar Room
[ Inference Seminar ] Bayesian Inference in Queueing Networks
Charles Sutton (University of Edinburgh)
Modern Web services, such as those at Google, Yahoo!, and Amazon, handle billions of requests per day on clusters of thousands of computers. Because these services operate under strict performance requirements, a statistical understanding of their performance is of great practical interest. Such services are modeled by networks of queues, where one queue models each of the individual computers in the system. A key challenge is that the data is incomplete, because recording detailed information about every request to a heavily used system can require unacceptable overhead. In this paper we develop a Bayesian perspective on queueing models in which the arrival and departure times that are not observed are treated as latent variables. Underlying this viewpoint is the observation that a queueing model defines a deterministic transformation between the data and a set of independent variables called the service times. With this viewpoint in hand, we sample from the posterior distribution over missing data and model parameters using Markov chain Monte Carlo. We evaluate our framework on data from a benchmark Web application. We also present a simple technique for selection among nested queueing models. We are unaware of any previous work that considers inference in networks of queues in the presence of missing data.

Contact: Dr Rónán Daly (rdaly@dcs.gla.ac.uk)

Add to my calendar