Clustering Based Outlier Detection for Improved Situation Awareness within Air Traffic Control

Sammanfattning: The aim of this thesis is to examine clustering based outlier detection algorithms on their ability to detect abnormal events in flight traffic. A nominal model is trained on a data-set containing only flights which are labeled as normal. A detection scoring function based on the nominal model is used to decide if a new and in forehand unseen data-point behaves like the nominal model or not. Due to the unknown structure of the data-set three different clustering algorithms are examined for training the nominal model, K-means, Gaussian Mixture Model and Spectral Clustering. Depending on the nominal model different methods to obtain a detection scoring is used, such as metric distance, probability and OneClass Support Vector Machine. This thesis concludes that a clustering based outlier detection algorithm is feasible for detecting abnormal events in flight traffic. The best performance was obtained by using Spectral Clustering combined with a Oneclass Support Vector Machine. The accuracy on the test data-set was 95.8%. The algorithm managed to correctly classify 89.4% of the datapoints labeled as abnormal and correctly classified 96.2% of the datapoints labeled as normal.