Thai V. Hoang

Romain Ilbert, Thai V. Hoang, Zonghua Zhang

Our study investigates the impact of data augmentation on the performance of multivariate time series models, focusing on datasets from the UCR archive. Despite the limited size of these datasets, we achieved classification accuracy improvements in 10 out of 13 datasets using the Rocket and InceptionTime models. This highlights the essential role of sufficient data in training effective models, paralleling the advancements seen in computer vision. Our work delves into adapting and applying existing methods in innovative ways to the domain of multivariate time series classification. Our comprehensive exploration of these techniques sets a new standard for addressing data scarcity in time series analysis, emphasizing that diverse augmentation strategies are crucial for unlocking the potential of both traditional and deep learning models. Moreover, by meticulously analyzing and applying a variety of augmentation techniques, we demonstrate that strategic data enrichment can enhance model accuracy. This not only establishes a benchmark for future research in time series analysis but also underscores the importance of adopting varied augmentation approaches to improve model performance in the face of limited data availability.

Hamza Bodor, Thai V. Hoang, Zonghua Zhang

Key Performance Indicators (KPI), which are essentially time series data, have been widely used to indicate the performance of telecom networks. Based on the given KPIs, a large set of anomaly detection algorithms have been deployed for detecting the unexpected network incidents. Generally, unsupervised anomaly detection algorithms gain more popularity than the supervised ones, due to the fact that labeling KPIs is extremely time- and resource-consuming, and error-prone. However, those unsupervised anomaly detection algorithms often suffer from excessive false alarms, especially in the presence of concept drifts resulting from network re-configurations or maintenance. To tackle this challenge and improve the overall performance of unsupervised anomaly detection algorithms, we propose to use active learning to introduce and benefit from the feedback of operators, who can verify the alarms (both false and true ones) and label the corresponding KPIs with reasonable effort. Specifically, we develop three query strategies to select the most informative and representative samples to label. We also develop an efficient method to update the weights of Isolation Forest and optimally adjust the decision threshold, so as to eventually improve the performance of detection model. The experiments with one public dataset and one proprietary dataset demonstrate that our active learning empowered anomaly detection pipeline could achieve performance gain, in terms of F1-score, more than 50% over the baseline algorithm. It also outperforms the existing active learning based methods by approximately 6%-10%, with significantly reduced budget (the ratio of samples to be labeled).