Anomaly detection for symbolic sequences and time series data

This thesis deals with the problem of anomaly detection for sequence data. Anomaly detection has been a widely researched problem in several application domains such as system health management, intrusion detection, health-care, bio-informatics, fraud detection, and mechanical fault detection. Traditional anomaly detection techniques analyze each data instance (as a univariate or multivariate record) independently, and ignore the sequential aspect of the data. Often, anomalies in sequences can be detected only by analyzing data instances together as a sequence, and hence cannot detected by traditional anomaly detection techniques. The problem of anomaly detection for sequence data is a rich area of research because of two main reasons. First, sequences can be of different types, e.g., symbolic sequences, time series data, etc., and each type of sequence poses unique set of problems. Second, anomalies in sequences can be defined in multiple ways and hence there are different problem formulations. In this thesis we focus on solving one particular problem formulation called semi-supervised anomaly detection. We study the problem separately for symbolic sequences, univariate time series data, and multivariate time series data. The state of art on anomaly detection for sequences is limited and fragmented across application domains. For symbolic sequences, several techniques have been proposed within specific domains, but it is not well-understood as to how a technique developed for one domain would perform in a completely different domain. For univariate time series data, limited techniques exist, and are only evaluated for specific domains, while for multivariate time series data, anomaly detection research is relatively untouched. This thesis has two key goals. First goal is to develop novel anomaly detection techniques for different types of sequences which perform better than existing techniques across a variety of application domains. The second goal is to identify the best anomaly detection technique for a given application domain. By realizing the first goal, we develop a suite of anomaly detection techniques for a domain scientist to choose from, while the second goal will help the scientist to choose the technique best suited for the task. To achieve the first goal, we develop several novel anomaly detection techniques for univariate symbolic sequences, univariate time series data, and multivariate time series data. We provide extensive experimental evaluation of the proposed techniques on data sets collected across diverse domains and generated from data generators, also developed as part of this thesis. We show how the proposed techniques can be used to detect anomalies which translate to critical events in domains such as aircraft safety, intrusion detection, and patient health management. The techniques proposed in this thesis are shown to outperform existing techniques on many data sets. The technique proposed for multivariate time series data is one of the very first anomaly detection technique that can detect complex anomalies in such data. To achieve the second goal, we study the relationship between anomaly detection techniques and the nature of the data on which they are applied. A novel analysis framework, Reference Based Analysis (RBA), is proposed that can map a given data set (of any type) into a multivariate continuous space with respect to a reference data set. We apply the RBA framework to not only visualize and understand complex data types, such as multivariate categorical data and symbolic sequence data, but also to extract data driven features from symbolic sequences, which when used with traditional anomaly detection techniques are shown to consistently outperform the state of art anomaly detection techniques for these complex data types. Two novel techniques for symbolic sequences, WIN1D and WIN 2D are proposed using the RBA framework which perform better than the best technique for each different data set.