Anomaly Detection in Sequences

While the algorithms we present are general and domain-independent, we focus on a specific problem that is critical to determining system-wide health of a fleet of aircraft. The approach taken uses unsupervised clustering of sequences using the normalized length of he longest common subsequence (nLCS) as a similarity measure, followed by a detailed analysis of outliers to detect anomalies.

In this method, an outlier sequence is defined as a sequence that is far away from a cluster. We present new algorithms for outlier analysis that provide comprehensible indicators as to why a particular sequence is deemed to be an outlier. The algorithm provides a coherent description to an analyst of the anomalies in the sequence when compared to more normal sequences.