Maritime Surveillance has received increased attention from a civilian perspective in recent years. Anomaly detection is one of many techniques available for improving the safety and security in this domain. Maritime authorities use confidential data sources for monitoring the maritime activities; however, a paradigm shift on the Internet has created new open sources of data. We investigate the potential of using open data as a complementary resource for anomaly detection in maritime surveillance. We present and evaluate a decision support system based on open data and expert rules for this purpose. We conduct a case study in which experts from the Swedish coastguard participate to conduct a real-world validation of the system. We conclude that the exploitation of open data as a complementary resource is feasible since our results indicate improvements in the efficiency and effectiveness of the existing surveillance systems by increasing the accuracy and covering unseen aspects of maritime activities.

The growth of Internet video and over-the-top transmission techniqueshas enabled online video service providers to deliver highquality video content to viewers. To maintain and improve thequality of experience, video providers need to detect unexpectedissues that can highly affect the viewers’ experience. This requiresanalyzing massive amounts of video session data in order to findunexpected sequences of events. In this paper we combine sequentialpattern mining and clustering to discover such event sequences.The proposed approach applies sequential pattern mining to findfrequent patterns by considering contextual and collective outliers.In order to distinguish between the normal and abnormal behaviorof the system, we initially identify the most frequent patterns. Thena clustering algorithm is applied on the most frequent patterns.The generated clustering model together with Silhouette Index areused for further analysis of less frequent patterns and detectionof potential outliers. Our results show that the proposed approachcan detect outliers at the system level.

Outlier detection has been studied in many domains. Outliers arise due to different reasons such as mechanical issues, fraudulent behavior, and human error. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised approach for outlier detection in a sequence dataset. The proposed approach combines sequential pattern mining, cluster analysis, and a minimum spanning tree algorithm in order to identify clusters of outliers. Initially, the sequential pattern mining is used to extract frequent sequential patterns. Next, the extracted patterns are clustered into groups of similar patterns. Finally, the minimum spanning tree algorithm is used to find groups of outliers. The proposed approach has been evaluated on two different real datasets, i.e., smart meter data and video session data. The obtained results have shown that our approach can be applied to narrow down the space of events to a set of potential outliers and facilitate domain experts in further analysis and identification of system level issues.

The aim of this study is to improve the monitoring and controlling of heating systems located at customer buildings through the use of a decision support system. To achieve this, the proposed system applies a two-step classifier to detect manual changes of the temperature of the heating system. We apply data from the Swedish company NODA, active in energy optimization and services for energy efficiency, to train and test the suggested system. The decision support system is evaluated through an experiment and the results are validated by experts at NODA. The results show that the decision support system can detect changes within three days after their occurrence and only by considering daily average measurements.

In this ongoing study, we propose a higher order data mining approach for modelling district heating (DH) substations’ behaviour and linking operational behaviour representative profiles with different performance indicators. We initially create substation’s operational behaviour models by extracting weekly patterns and clustering them into groups of similar patterns. The built models are further analyzed and integrated into an overall substation model by applying consensus clustering. The different operational behaviour profiles represented by the exemplars of the consensus clustering model are then linked to performance indicators. The labelled behaviour profiles are deployed over the whole heating season to derive diverse insights about the substation’s performance. The results show that the proposed method can be used for modelling, analyzing and understanding the deviating and sub-optimal DH substation’s behaviours. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

In this study, we propose a multi-view clustering approach for mining and analysing multi-view network datasets. The proposed approach is applied and evaluated on a real-world scenario for monitoring and analysing district heating (DH) network conditions and identifying substations with sub-optimal behaviour. Initially, geographical locations of the substations are used to build an approximate graph representation of the DH network. Two different analyses can further be applied in this context: step-wise and parallel-wise multi-view clustering. The step-wise analysis is meant to sequentially consider and analyse substations with respect to a few different views. At each step, a new clustering solution is built on top of the one generated by the previously considered view, which organizes the substations in a hierarchical structure that can be used for multi-view comparisons. The parallel-wise analysis on the other hand, provides the opportunity to analyse substations with regards to two different views in parallel. Such analysis is aimed to represent and identify the relationships between substations by organizing them in a bipartite graph and analysing the substations’ distribution with respect to each view. The proposed data analysis and visualization approach arms domain experts with means for analysing DH network performance. In addition, it will facilitate the identification of substations with deviating operational behaviour based on comparative analysis with their closely located neighbours.

In this study, we propose a higher order mining approach that can be used for the analysis of real-world datasets. The approach can be used to monitor and identify the deviating operational behaviour of the studied phenomenon in the absence of prior knowledge about the data. The proposed approach consists of several different data analysis techniques, such as sequential pattern mining, clustering analysis, consensus clustering and the minimum spanning tree (MST). Initially, a clustering analysis is performed on the extracted patterns to model the behavioural modes of the studied phenomenon for a given time interval. The generated clustering models, which correspond to every two consecutive time intervals, can further be assessed to determine changes in the monitored behaviour. In cases in which significant differences are observed, further analysis is performed by integrating the generated models into a consensus clustering and applying an MST to identify deviating behaviours. The validity and potential of the proposed approach is demonstrated on a real-world dataset originating from a network of district heating (DH) substations. The obtained results show that our approach is capable of detecting deviating and sub-optimal behaviours of DH substations.