In the fifth-generation (5G) mobile networks, proactive network optimisation plays an important role in meeting the exponential traffic growth, more stringent service requirements, and to reduce capital and operational expenditure. Proactive network optimisation is widely acknowledged as one of the most promising ways to transform the 5G network based on big data analysis and cloud-fog-edge computing, but there are many challenges. Proactive algorithms will require accurate forecasting of highly contextualised traffic demand and quantifying the uncertainty to drive decision making with performance guarantees. Context in Cyber-Physical-Social Systems (CPSS) is often challenging to uncover, unfolds over time, and even more difficult to quantify and integrate into decision making. The first part of the review focuses on mining and inferring CPSS context from heterogeneous data sources, such as online user-generated-content. It will examine the state-of-the-art methods currently employed to infer location, social behaviour, and traffic demand through a cloud-edge computing framework; combining them to form the input to proactive algorithms. The second part of the review focuses on exploiting and integrating the demand knowledge for a range of proactive optimisation techniques, including the key aspects of load balancing, mobile edge caching, and interference management. In both parts, appropriate state-of-the-art machine learning techniques (including probabilistic uncertainty cascades in proactive optimisation), complexity-performance trade-offs, and demonstrative examples are presented to inspire readers. This survey couples the potential of online big data analytics, cloud-edge computing, statistical machine learning, and proactive network optimisation in a common cross-layer wireless framework. The wider impact of this survey includes better cross-fertilising the academic fields of data analytics, mobile edge computing, AI, CPSS, and wireless communications, as well as informing the industry of the promising potentials in this area.INDEX TERMS Online data, data analytics, proactive network optimisation, 5G.

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In the fifth-generation (5G) mobile networks, the traffic is estimated to have a fast-changing and imbalance spatial-temporal distribution. It is challenging for a system-level optimisation to deal with while empirically maintaining quality of service. The 5G load balancing aims to address this problem by transferring the extra traffic from a high-load cell to its neighbouring idle cells. In recent literature, controller and machine learning algorithms are applied to assist the self-optimising and proactive schemes in drawing load balancing decisions. However, these algorithms lack the ability of forecasting upcoming high traffic demands, especially during popular events. This shortage leads to cold-start problems because of reacting to the changes in the heterogeneous dense deployment. Notably, the hotspots corresponding with skew load distribution will result in low convergence speed. To address these problems, this paper contributes to three aspects. Firstly, urban event detection is proposed to forecast the changes in cellular hotspots based on Twitter data for enabling context-awareness. Secondly, a proactive 5G load balancing strategy is simulated considering the prediction of the skewed-distributed hotspots in urban areas. Finally, we optimise this context-aware proactive load balancing strategy by forecasting the best activation time. This paper represents one of the first works to couple the real-world urban event detection with proactive load balancing. INDEX TERMS Context-aware, data analytics, proactive load balancing, 5G, machine learning.