Discovering Anomalous Aviation Safety Events Using Scalable Data Mining Algorithms

Most modern commercial aircraft have onboard flight data recorders that record several hundred discrete and continuous parameters at approximately 1Hz for the entire duration of the flight. These data contain information about the flight control systems, actuators, engines, landing gear, avionics, and pilot commands.

In this paper, recent advances in the development of a novel knowledge discovery process consisting of a suite of data mining techniques for identifying precursors to aviation safety incidents are discussed. The data mining techniques include scalable multiple-kernel learning for large-scale distributed anomaly detection. A novel multivariate time-series search algorithm is used to search for signatures of discovered anomalies on massive datasets.