Anomaly Detection in Streaming Data from a Sensor Network

Sammanfattning: In this thesis, the use of unsupervised and semi-supervised machine learning techniques was analyzed as potential tools for anomaly detection in the sensor network that the electrical system in a Scania truck is comprised of. The experimentation was designed to analyse the need for both point and contextual anomaly detection in this setting. For the point anomaly detection the method of Isolation Forest was experimented with and for contextual anomaly detection two different recurrent neural network architectures using Long Short Term Memory units was relied on. One model was simply a many to one regression model trained to predict a certain signal, while the other was an encoder-decoder network trained to reconstruct a sequence. Both models were trained in an semi-supervised manner, i.e. on data that only depicts normal behaviour, which theoretically should lead to a performance drop on abnormal sequences resulting in higher error terms. In both setting the parameters of a Gaussian distribution were estimated using these error terms which allowed for a convenient way of defining a threshold which would decide if the observation would be flagged as anomalous or not. Additional experimentation's using an exponential weighted moving average over a number of past observations to filter the signal was also conducted. The models performance on this particular task was very different but the regression model showed a lot of promise especially when combined with a filtering preprocessing step to reduce the noise in the data. However the model selection will always be governed by the nature the particular task at hand so the other methods might perform better in other settings.