skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: Mining Multivariate Discrete Event Sequences for Knowledge Discovery and Anomaly Detection
Modern physical systems deploy large numbers of sensors to record at different time-stamps the status of different systems components via measurements such as temperature, pressure, speed, but also the component's categorical state. Depending on the measurement values, there are two kinds of sequences: continuous and discrete. For continuous sequences, there is a host of state-of-the-art algorithms for anomaly detection based on time-series analysis, but there is a lack of effective methodologies that are tailored specifically to discrete event sequences. This paper proposes an analytics framework for discrete event sequences for knowledge discovery and anomaly detection. During the training phase, the framework extracts pairwise relationships among discrete event sequences using a neural machine translation model by viewing each discrete event sequence as a "natural language". The relationship between sequences is quantified by how well one discrete event sequence is "translated" into another sequence. These pairwise relationships among sequences are aggregated into a multivariate relationship graph that clusters the structural knowledge of the underlying system and essentially discovers the hidden relationships among discrete sequences. This graph quantifies system behavior during normal operation. During testing, if one or more pairwise relationships are violated, an anomaly is detected. The proposed framework is evaluated on two real-world datasets: a proprietary dataset collected from a physical plant where it is shown to be effective in extracting sensor pairwise relationships for knowledge discovery and anomaly detection, and a public hard disk drive dataset where its ability to effectively predict upcoming disk failures is illustrated.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1838022
PAR ID:
10206152
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the 50th IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, DSN 2020
Volume:
1
Page Range / eLocation ID:
552 to 563
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Summary A nonparametric framework for changepoint detection, based on scan statistics utilizing graphs that represent similarities among observations, is gaining attention owing to its flexibility and good performance for high-dimensional and non-Euclidean data sequences. However, this graph-based framework faces challenges when there are repeated observations in the sequence, which is often the case for discrete data such as network data. In this article we extend the graph-based framework to solve this problem by averaging or taking the union of all possible optimal graphs resulting from repeated observations. We consider both the single-changepoint alternative and the changed-interval alternative, and derive analytical formulas to control the Type I error for the new methods, making them readily applicable to large datasets. The extended methods are illustrated on an application in detecting changes in a sequence of dynamic networks over time. All proposed methods are implemented in an $$\texttt{R}$$ package $$\texttt{gSeg}$$ available on CRAN. 
    more » « less
  2. Abstract Deep generative learning cannot only be used for generating new data with statistical characteristics derived from input data but also for anomaly detection, by separating nominal and anomalous instances based on their reconstruction quality. In this paper, we explore the performance of three unsupervised deep generative models—variational autoencoders (VAEs) with Gaussian, Bernoulli, and Boltzmann priors—in detecting anomalies in multivariate time series of commercial-flight operations. We created two VAE models with discrete latent variables (DVAEs), one with a factorized Bernoulli prior and one with a restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) with novel positive-phase architecture as prior, because of the demand for discrete-variable models in machine-learning applications and because the integration of quantum devices based on two-level quantum systems requires such models. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first that applies DVAE models to anomaly-detection tasks in the aerospace field. The DVAE with RBM prior, using a relatively simple—and classically or quantum-mechanically enhanceable—sampling technique for the evolution of the RBM’s negative phase, performed better in detecting anomalies than the Bernoulli DVAE and on par with the Gaussian model, which has a continuous latent space. The transfer of a model to an unseen dataset with the same anomaly but without re-tuning of hyperparameters or re-training noticeably impaired anomaly-detection performance, but performance could be improved by post-training on the new dataset. The RBM model was robust to change of anomaly type and phase of flight during which the anomaly occurred. Our studies demonstrate the competitiveness of a discrete deep generative model with its Gaussian counterpart on anomaly-detection problems. Moreover, the DVAE model with RBM prior can be easily integrated with quantum sampling by outsourcing its generative process to measurements of quantum states obtained from a quantum annealer or gate-model device. 
    more » « less
  3. This paper is devoted to the detection of contingencies in modern power systems. Because the systems we consider are under the framework of cyber-physical systems, it is necessary to take into consideration of the information processing aspect and communication networks. A consequence is that noise and random disturbances are unavoidable. The detection problem then becomes one known as quickest detection. In contrast to running the detection problem in a discretetime setting leading to a sequence of detection problems, this work focuses on the problem in a continuous-time setup. We treat stochastic differential equation models. One of the distinct features is that the systems are hybrid involving both continuous states and discrete events that coexist and interact. The discrete event process is modeled by a continuous-time Markov chain representing random environments that are not resented by a continuous sample path. The quickest detection then can be written as an optimal stopping problem. This paper is devoted to finding numerical solutions to the underlying problem. We use a Markov chain approximation method to construct the numerical algorithms. Numerical examples are used to demonstrate the performance. 
    more » « less
  4. The proliferation of web platforms has created incentives for online abuse. Many graph-based anomaly detection techniques are proposed to identify the suspicious accounts and behaviors. However, most of them detect the anomalies once the users have performed many such behaviors. Their performance is substantially hindered when the users' observed data is limited at an early stage, which needs to be improved to minimize financial loss. In this work, we propose Eland, a novel framework that uses action sequence augmentation for early anomaly detection. Eland utilizes a sequence predictor to predict next actions of every user and exploits the mutual enhancement between action sequence augmentation and user-action graph anomaly detection. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that Eland improves the performance of a variety of graph-based anomaly detection methods. With Eland, anomaly detection performance at an earlier stage is better than non-augmented methods that need significantly more observed data by up to 15% on the Area under the ROC curve. 
    more » « less
  5. Anomaly-based attack detection methods depend on some form of machine learning to detect data falsification attacks in smart living cyber–physical systems. However, there is a lack of studies that consider the presence of attacks during the training phase and their effect on detection and false alarm performance. To improve the robustness of time series learning for anomaly detection, we propose a framework by modifying design choices such as regression error type and loss function type while learning the thresholds for an anomaly detection framework during the training phase. Specifically, we offer theoretical proofs on the relationship between poisoning attack strengths and how that informs the choice of loss functions used to learn the detection thresholds. This, in turn, leads to explainability of why and when our framework mitigates data poisoning and the trade-offs associated with such design changes. The theoretical results are backed by experimental results that prove attack mitigation performance with NIST-specified metrics for CPS, using real data collected from a smart metering infrastructure as a proof of concept. Thus, the contribution is a framework that guarantees security of ML and ML for security simultaneously. 
    more » « less