higher resolution (and accuracy). Keep in mind that
the Markov model was designed with stream similar-
ity in mind. Taking this into account, and the simplic-
ity of the model (which implies faster training times)
makes the Markov model more than sufficient for sev-
eral real world scenarios.
Table 1 presents a comparison between both mod-
els. In short, the model based on GANs provides
more flexibility and resolution when considering only
stream generation. Nevertheless, keep in mind that in
order to achieve the desired resolution may be nec-
essary to tune the hyper-parameters until sufficient
accuracy is achieved. On the other hand, the model
based on Markov chain was designed for stream sim-
ilarity, only provides moderate resolution. Although
the size of the bucket can be adjusted, the model only
used the previous state in order to compute the next
bucket, in this regards the model is shallow. The lack
of flexibility is compensated with a simpler training
method and faster execution.
Table 1: Comparison between Markov and GANs model for
stream generation.
Features/Model Markov GANs
Training time Fast Slow
Model size Small Large
Generation time Fast Fast
Resolution (accuracy) Moderate High
Stream Similarity Capable NA
Hyper-parameters Limited Flexible
6 CONCLUSION
The number of sensing devices is increasing at a
steady step. Each one of them generates massive
amounts of information. This lead to a new genera-
tion of IoT and M2M platforms that capture the pre-
viously mentioned information and provide context-
aware services. Currently these platforms use ad-
vanced machine learning algorithms to improve and
optimize several processes. Having the ability to test
them for a long time in a controlled environment is
extremely important. The ability to generate streams
resembling a given set of learning ones can be useful
in this situation. Stream generators can be used ver-
ify and improve the repeatability and validity of IoT/
M2M and context-aware platforms.
Both models discussed in this publication can be
used for this task. Nevertheless, there are several dif-
ferences between them. GAN based models provide
better resolution and flexibility at the cost if longer
training times and fine-tuning. On the other hand,
Markov models provide moderate resolution, can be
used to estimate similarity between streams and are
fast to train.
Due to time constrains the evaluation and com-
parison between the models lacked sufficient detail.
We intend to address this issue in a future publication,
with a larger dataset for validation. It is important to
notice that generator based on the first order Markov
chain is still under research. Several improvements
will be proposed in the future, such as methods to es-
timate the bucket size autonomously.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work is funded by FCT/MEC through national
funds and when applicable co-funded by FEDER
– PT2020 partnership agreement under the project
UID/EEA/50008/2019.
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