← Back to context

Comment by paddleon

3 days ago

did similar work at similar scale to srean.

Assume you have signal from one IoT device, say a sensor reading. Anomalies are sudden changes in the value of the signal. Define sudden (using the time delta between observations and your other domain knowledge); let's say the sensor reports 1x/second and sudden means 1-3 minutes.

Simple options: rolling mean last 3 values/rolling mean last 60 values. If this value is over a threshold, alert

Say the readings are normally distributed, or they can be detrended/made normal via a simple 1 or 2 stage AR/MA model. Apply the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Electric_rules to detect anomalies.

Complexer but still simple options. Say you have IoT sensors over a larger area, and an anomaly is one sensor which is higher than others. Run roughly the same analysis as above, but on the correlation matrix of all the sensors. Look for rapidly changing correlations.

example: temperature detectors in each room of your house, and your kid opens the front door to go play in the snow. The entry hall cools down while the rest of the house's temp stays roughly stable. You can picture what that does to the correlation matrix.

Bang on.

It was little more complicated to remove temporal dependencies from the original streams and we could not rely on Gaussian behaviour. Other than that, it's pretty much the same, barring an effort to keep the alerting thresholds unaffected by recent anomalies.