Abstract: Accurate short-term traffic prediction is essential for improving the efficiency of data transmission in low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks. However, traffic values may be missing due to collector failures, transmission errors, and memory failures in complex space environments. Incomplete traffic time series prevent the efficient utilization of data, which can significantly reduce the traffic prediction accuracy. To overcome this problem, the present paper proposes a novel spatio-temporal correlation based incomplete time series traffic prediction model (ITP-ST), which consists of two phases: reconstituting the incomplete time series by missing data imputation and making traffic prediction based on the reconstructed time series. In the first phase, we propose a novel missing data imputation (IDAE-MDI) model based on the improved denoising autoencoder (DAE). Specifically, we combine DAE with the gramian angular summation field (GASF) to establish the temporal correlation between different time intervals and extract the structural patterns from the time series. Taking advantage of the unique spatio-temporal correlation of the LEO satellite network traffic, we focus on improving the missing data initialization method for DAE. In the second phase, we propose a traffic prediction (TP-CACNN) model based on a multi-channel attention mechanism convolutional neural network (CNN) by combining the spatio-temporally correlated traffic of the LEO satellite network. Finally, for achieving the ideal structure of these models, we use the multi-verse optimizer (MVO) algorithm to select the optimal combination of model parameters. Experiments on real traffic datasets show that the ITP-ST method outperforms the baseline model in terms of traffic prediction accuracy at different missing data rates, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed model.