In one embodiment, techniques are shown and described relating to traffic-based inference of influence domains in a network by using learning machines. In particular, in one embodiment, a management device computes a time-based traffic matrix indicating traffic between pairs of transmitter and receiver nodes in a computer network, and also determines a time-based quality parameter for a particular node in the computer network. By correlating the time-based traffic matrix and time-based quality parameter for the particular node, the device may then determine an influence of particular traffic of the traffic matrix on the particular node.