Anomaly Detection based on Alarms Data

Alarms data is a very important source of information for network operation center (NOC) teams to aggregate and display alarming events occurring within a network element. However, on a large network, a long list of alarms is generated almost continuously. Intelligent analytical reporting of these alarms is needed to help the NOC team to eliminate noise and focus on primary events. Hence, there is a need for an anomaly detection model to learn from and use historical alarms data to achieve this. It is also important to indicate the root cause of anomalies so that immediate corrective action can be taken. In this paper, we aim to design an anomaly detection model in the context of alarms data (categorical data) in the field of telecommunication and that can be used as a first step for further root cause analysis. To do this, we introduce a new algorithm to derive four features based on historical data and aggregate them to generate a final score that is optimized through supervised labels for greater accuracy. These four features reflect the likelihood of occurrence of events, the sequence of events and the importance of relatively new events not seen in the historical data. Certain assumptions are tested on the data using the relevant statistical tests. After validating these assumptions, we measure the accuracy on labelled data, revealing that the proposed algorithm performs with a high anomaly detection accuracy.