Data Augmentation for Traffic Classification

Data Augmentation (DA) -- enriching training data by adding synthetic samples -- is a technique widely adopted in Computer Vision (CV) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks to improve models performance. Yet, DA has struggled to gain traction in networking contexts, particularly in Traffic Classification (TC) tasks. In this work, we fulfill this gap by benchmarking 18 augmentation functions applied to 3 TC datasets using packet time series as input representation and considering a variety of training conditions. Our results show that (i) DA can reap benefits previously unexplored with (ii) augmentations acting on time series sequence order and masking being a better suit for TC and (iii) simple latent space analysis can provide hints about why augmentations have positive or negative effects.