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Anomaly Detection
IFAC PapersOnLine 55-10 Method of Aircraft System
(2022) 1582–1587
using Multivariate Time Series Clusteringofand
Anomaly Detection Method Aircraft System Techniques
Classification
using Multivariate
AnomalyTime Series Clustering and Classification Techniques
Anomaly Detection
Detection MethodMethod of of Aircraft
Aircraft System
System
using
using Multivariate
Multivariate Time
Time Series
Series Clustering
Clustering and and Classification
Classification Techniques
Techniques
Mohamed Ben Slimene & Mohamed-Salah Ouali *
Mohamed Ben
Mohamed Ben Slimene
Slimene & & Mohamed-Salah
Mohamed-Salah Ouali Ouali * *
Polytechnique Montreal, Montreal (QC), Canada, H3C3A7
(Phone: 514 4304711 Mohamed
Polytechnique
#5929; e-mail:
Polytechnique Ben Slimene
Montreal, & Mohamed-Salah
Montreal (QC), Canada,
Mohamed.ben-slimene@polymtl.ca,
Montreal, Montreal (QC), Canada, Ouali
H3C3A7
H3C3A7 *msouali@polymtl.ca).
Mohamed Ben Slimene & Mohamed-Salah Ouali *
(Phone: 514
(Phone: 514 4304711
*Member
4304711 #5929;
of #5929;
CIRRELT e-mail:
e-mail: Mohamed.ben-slimene@polymtl.ca,
(https://www.cirrelt.ca) and IVADO (https://ivado.ca)
Mohamed.ben-slimene@polymtl.ca, msouali@polymtl.ca).
msouali@polymtl.ca).
Polytechnique Montreal, Montreal (QC), Canada, H3C3A7
*MemberPolytechnique
*Member of CIRRELT
of CIRRELT (https://www.cirrelt.ca)
(https://www.cirrelt.ca)
Montreal, Montreal (QC), andCanada,
and IVADO H3C3A7
IVADO (https://ivado.ca)
(https://ivado.ca)
(Phone: 514 4304711 #5929; e-mail: Mohamed.ben-slimene@polymtl.ca, msouali@polymtl.ca).
(Phone: 514 4304711 #5929; e-mail: Mohamed.ben-slimene@polymtl.ca, msouali@polymtl.ca).
*Member of CIRRELT (https://www.cirrelt.ca) and IVADO (https://ivado.ca)
Abstract: *Member of CIRRELT (https://www.cirrelt.ca) and IVADO (https://ivado.ca)
Abstract:
Abstract:
The paper presents an anomaly detection method that identifies and explains anomalies in an aircraft system
Abstract:
Abstract:
The
The paper
based presents
presents an
on explainable
paper anomaly
anomaly detection
an multivariate time series
detection method
method that
that identifies
clustering and
and explains
techniques.
identifies The method
explains anomalies
considers
anomalies in
in an
anthe aircraft system
cyclicity
aircraft system of
based
each
based on
on explainable
variable within the
explainable multivariate
multivariate time
flight phases
time series
and
series clustering
selects thosetechniques.
clustering behind theThe
techniques. method
anomalies.
The method considers
It combines
considers the
the thecyclicity
Density-
cyclicity of
of
The paper presents an anomaly detection method that identifies and explains anomalies in an aircraft system
each
The
Based
each variable
paper
Spatial
variable within
presents an the
Clustering
within the flight
anomaly
of phases
detection
Applications
flight phases and
and selects
method
with thatthose
Noise
selects behind
identifies
(DBSCAN)
those behind andthe and
the anomalies.
explains
a modified
anomalies. It
anomalies
It combines
Dynamic in an Time
combines the
aircraft
the Density-
system
Warping
Density-
based on explainable multivariate time series clustering techniques. The method considers the cyclicity of
Based
based on
(DTW)
Based Spatial
distance
Spatial Clustering
explainablealgorithms
Clustering oftoApplications
multivariatedetecttime abnormal with
series Noise
clustering
behavioral(DBSCAN)
techniques. and
andThe
profiles within aa modified
method
the Dynamic
considers
collected flight the Time
phases Warping
cyclicity
without of
each variable within the of Applications
flight phases and with Noisethose
selects (DBSCAN)
behind the modified
anomalies. ItDynamic
combines Time
the Warping
Density-
(DTW)
each
any prior
(DTW)Spatial distance
variableknowledge
distance algorithms
within the
algorithmson theto
flightdetect
phases
system’s abnormal
and
behavior. behavioral
selects those
The profiles
behind
proposed within
the
method the
anomalies. collected
explains It flight
combines
those phases
abnormal the without
Density-
profiles
Based Clustering of to detect abnormal
Applications with behavioral
Noise (DBSCAN) profiles within the collected
and a modified flight phases
Dynamic Time Warpingwithout
any
any prior
Based
comparedprior knowledge
Spatial Clustering
to normal
knowledge on
on ofthe
profiles
thetosystem’s
Applications
using a new
system’s behavior.
with Noise
importance
behavior. The proposed
The(DBSCAN) method
score. Profiles
proposed and aare explains
modified
detected those
usingabnormal
Dynamic theTime Time profiles
Warping
Series
(DTW) distance algorithms detect abnormal behavioral profilesmethodwithin the explains
collected those flightabnormal profiles
phases without
compared
(DTW)
Forest
compared (TSF) to
distance
to normal
and
normal theprofiles
algorithms to using
detect
silhouette
profiles using aaabnormal
criterion.new
new importance
Thebehavioral
method
importance score. Profiles
profiles
is trained
score. Profileswithinandare
arethe detected
collected
tested
detected using using
flight
using the
a samplephases
the Time
Time from Series
without
the
Series
any prior knowledge on the system’s behavior. The proposed method explains those abnormal profiles
Forest
any
Bombardier’s
Forest (TSF)
prior
(TSF) and
knowledge
Aircraft
and the
the onsilhouette
the system’s
Health criterion.
Monitoring
silhouette criterion. The
behavior.
System.
The method
The is
proposedtrained
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method is trainedmethodtheand
and tested
explains
normal
tested using
and those
using aa abnormal
abnormal sample
sample from
behaviors the
profiles
from by
the
compared to normal profiles using a new importance score. Profiles are detected using the Time Series
Bombardier’s
compared
achieving
Bombardier’s Aircraft
atoclustering
normal
Aircraft Health
profiles
silhouette
Health Monitoring
using
score
Monitoring a new System.
importance
of 0.95 It distinguishes
and detects
System. It score. Profiles
unknown
distinguishes the normal
are
profiles
the normal detected
withand
and a abnormal
using theof
precision
abnormal behaviors
Time
89%.Series
behaviors by
by
Forest (TSF) and the silhouette criterion. The method is trained and tested using a sample from the
achieving
Forest
achieving
Keywords: (TSF)
Copyright © 2022a
a clustering
and
clustering
Aircraft the silhouette
silhouette
silhouette
Health
The Authors. score
criterion.
score
Monitoring
This is of
of
an 0.95
0.95
System, The
open and
and detects
method
detects
Anomaly
access unknown
is trained
unknown
detection,
article under the profiles
and
profiles tested
Clustering,
CC with
with
BY-NC-ND a
using
a precision
a
precision
machine licensesample of
of
learning. 89%.
from
89%. the
Bombardier’s Aircraft Health Monitoring System. It distinguishes the normal and abnormal behaviors by
Bombardier’s Aircraft Health Monitoring System. It distinguishes the normal and abnormal behaviors by
Keywords:
Keywords:
achieving aAircraft
(https://creativecommons.org
Aircraft
clustering Health
Health Monitoring
Monitoring
silhouette score of System,
/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
System,
0.95 and Anomaly
detectsdetection,
Anomaly unknown Clustering,
detection, profiles withmachine
Clustering, machine
a precision learning.
learning.
of 89%.
achieving a clustering silhouette score of 0.95 and detects unknown profiles with a precision of 89%.
Keywords: Aircraft Health Monitoring System, Anomaly detection, Clustering, machine learning.
Keywords: Aircraft Health Monitoring System, Anomaly detection,
abnormal Clustering,
patterns withinmachine
a multivariate learning. time series data (i.e.,
1. INTRODUCTION abnormal patterns within a multivariate time
element). Deep learning
abnormal patterns within a multivariate time architectures whereserieswidely
series data (i.e.,
data used.
(i.e.,
1.
1. INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
Aircraft operation can be improved by analyzing the detailed LSTM element).
element). Deep
Recurrent
Deep learning
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learning architectures
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architectures (RNN) where
where waswidely
trained
widely used.
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1.during
be improved
INTRODUCTION
daily flights
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analyzing the 2015). LSTM
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element). Deep learning architectures where widely used.
time was
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data (i.e.,
by
1. INTRODUCTION
flight
Signals
flight data
data recorded
generated
recorded byduring
sensors
during daily
daily flights
installed
flights (Dani
on some
(Dani et
et al.,
al., 2015).
aircraft
2015). (Nanduri
element).
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2016) to
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Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) was trained by
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et al., aircraft time series
detected
2015). (Nanduri
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2015). (Nanduri
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Davis, 2009).
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2405-8963 Copyright are ©used2022toThe detect and This
Authors. discover
is an open known or new
access promising
article under method in terms. of anomaly detection efficiency
the CC BY-NC-ND
Peer review under responsibility of International Federation of Automatic Control.
10.1016/j.ifacol.2022.09.616
Mohamed Ben Slimene et al. / IFAC PapersOnLine 55-10 (2022) 1582–1587 1583

was the ANN. (Gorinevsky et al., 2012) proposed a technique case of known behavior, the Time Series Forest technique is
called Distributed Fleet Monitoring (DFM) which consists of applied to predict a given phase’s profile.
building tree-level regression models using Partial Least
Squares (PLS). These regression models describe time inside The rest of this article is organized in 3 sections. Section 2
the flight, flight-to-flight trend and aircraft-to-aircraft presents the proposed method for flight phases anomaly
variability during different flight phases including climb, detection. Section 3 applies and validates the method using a
cruise, level turns, and descent. real database. and discusses the obtained results. Section 4 is
dedicated for the conclusion and future research.
Employing supervised learning techniques for anomaly
detection is not always possible because the data must be 2. THE PROPOSED METHOD
labeled to perform regression or classification. Hence, the Figure 1 depicts the proposed four-step method that discovers
history of abnormal elements is very limited because it is and characterizes the normal and abnormal aircraft system
dangerous and expensive to perform test flights under extreme behavior profiles by clustering multivariate time series dataset.
abnormal conditions (Yan et al., 2021). Since the method uses an unsupervised learning technique,
expert validation and recommendations are very important to
Unsupervised techniques can be used in extracting patterns
explain the obtained profiles
through unlabeled time series datasets to learn the normal
behavior and detect abnormal or unknown observations which
are inconsistent when compared with most of the data.
Clustering analysis was deployed in anomaly detection. It
consists of classifying a large amount of data without any prior
knowledge about classes (Aghabozorgi et al., 2015). (Dani et
al., 2015) used the Density-Based Spatial Clustering of
Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) to cluster segments
extracted from the time series. Segments were generated using
the Adaptive Piecewise Constant Approximation (APCA)
which efficiently reduced the data size. The proposed
algorithm considers non-classified segments as abnormal.
Since it processes segments instead of time series, this
methodology does not capture time dependencies. (Deshmukh
and Hwang, 2019) used DBSCAN algorithm to class trajectory
observation into similar classes and to identify abnormalities.
Afterwards, one-Class Support Vector Machine was trained
only on normal data to build an equation for each normal class.
Anomalies are then detected using cluster’ patterns. Figure 1. Proposed four-step method

Hence, the research gap lies mainly in the fact that no anomaly The extracted phases will be clustered using the DBSCAN
detection technique considers the cyclicity of each signal clustering algorithm together with the Dynamic Time Warping
within flight phases and gives insights about signals (DTW) distance. The proposed algorithm takes into account
responsible for anomalies. Besides that, most of the above- the cyclic nature of signals corresponding to flight phases as
discussed anomaly detection algorithms are computationally well as the interaction between variables. Extracted profiles
time-consuming. The aim of this paper is to develop an will be diagnosed by comparing them with normal signals
interpretable method that detects, and diagnoses abnormal based on a new importance score. This score allows for
aircraft system behavior based on multivariate time series identifying signals that have the most influence on the
analysis. The method can characterize each extracted anomaly distinction between the normal and each abnormal profile. In
using interpretable symptoms. More specifically, the objective this step, we go to experts to validate, characterize and
is to build an anomaly detection method without any prior interpret extracted profiles based on their expertise. The result
knowledge of system behavior labels based on supervised and of the methodology is a trained anomaly detection model based
unsupervised learning techniques. Since flight phases have on the new silhouette test for novelty detection and the Time
different behaviors and characteristics, this method will be Series Forest for the classification of known profiles. The
limited to flight time windows that start and end according to different steps of the methodology will be detailed in the rest
a specific period. The proposed method can be divided into of this section.
four principles steps. The first one extracts and prepares flight
phases multivariate time series. The DBSCAN clustering 2.1 Step-1: Extract and prepare flight phases
method is used to extract normal and abnormal profiles in the Step-1 consists of defining and extracting the studied phase
second step. The third step proposes a new importance score time series from whole flight sessions based on experts’
to calculate the contributions of each of the collected time recommendations. Pertinent parameters are chosen by an
series to identify the obtained abnormal profiles. Finally, the expert to maximize the chance of finding anomalies the period
fourth step proposes a new anomaly detection technique called phases under consideration. The expert fixes start and end
the Silhouette test to detect unknown system behavior. In the events to extract the time phase period windows from full
session time series. Since aircrafts are monitored using
1584 Mohamed Ben Slimene et al. / IFAC PapersOnLine 55-10 (2022) 1582–1587

thousands of sensors, only consider signals deemed by experts to form a cluster. Hence, two elements of multivariate time
relevant to the considered flight phase are extracted. series are neighbors if the DTW distance between them is less
then Eps.
2.2 Step-2: Discover normal and abnormal profiles
• Clustering evaluation
Step-2 focuses on the extraction of normal operation profiles
by grouping the time series based on their shapes and trends. The quality of the clustering is evaluated using the Silhouette
In order to do so, Step-2 combines both the DBSCAN and the score. The silhouette represents the difference between the
DTW distance techniques to group phases having similar average distance of each element with the elements of the same
behavior in the same cluster. To compare two multivariate group as it (cohesion) and the average distance with the
time series that begin and end with the same events but not the elements of other neighboring groups (separation). If this
same length, the DTW distance measure is used to difference is negative, the point is on average closer to the
discriminate between them. This method allows to compute an neighboring group than to its own; it is therefore poorly
optimal correspondence between two time series by classified. Conversely, if this difference is positive, the
considering the deformation in time with some restrictions and element is on average closer to its group than to the
rules. Each of the extracted clusters represent different normal neighboring groups; it is therefore well classified (Rousseeuw,
operation profiles. Unclassified time series phases are 1987). The silhouette of an element should be within the
considered as abnormal profiles. To further refine the interval [-1, 1]. The silhouette score is the average silhouette
clustering, the DBSCAN technique is applied several times of all elements of the cluster. A greater silhouette score
until the desired level of confidence is reached. The indicates that the clustering has a good structure. A partition
unclassified times series may contain abnormal profiles. can be validated if its silhouette score is greater than 0.5.
2.2.1 Distance measure 2.2.3 Profile extraction
The Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) distance is intended to To identify normal and abnormal profiles, two iterations of the
compare two time series that begin and end with the same DBSCAN algorithm is performed. First, we cluster all
events, such as the case of flight phases. Thus, A dissimilarity elements for the purpose of labeling them to normal (landing
measure is proposed to compare multidimensional cyclic phases in clusters) and abnormal (unclassified phases). The
signals whose speed of behavior can vary. This technique second clustering only concerns the unclassified elements.
allows to compute an optimal correspondence between two This allows for the identification of abnormal profiles.
time series by considering the deformation in time with some
restrictions and rules. Thus, the distance corresponds to the 2.3 Step-3: Abnormal profiles characterization
sum of the weights of the optimal path to make the alignment
Once normal and abnormal clusters are extracted, each
between the observations of the two compared series (Yang et
obtained cluster is characterized with its medoid. Each
al., 2019).
abnormal profile will be diagnosed by comparing each of its
Since DTW uses Euclidean distance to compare time series, dimensions with reference to the normal profile. The medoid
the individual extract multivariate time series are normalized denotes an average element from which the sum of distances
to give equal weight to each dimension of the time series. to all elements is minimal. Then, the contribution of each
Thus, each variable will be normalized by removing its signal in the identification of abnormal profile is measured
average value and scaling the unit variance of the entire using an importance score. Hence, to identify the variable that
dataset. The standard score of a sample x is calculated as z = makes abnormal phases different from normal behaviours, the
(x − u) average distance between univariate abnormal phases and the
, where u is the average value and s is the standard
𝑠𝑠𝑠𝑠 medoids of its nearest normal clusters using the DTW distance
deviation of the samples studied. Centering and scaling are is calculated.
done independently for each dimension of the time series by
calculating the relevant statistics over all elements. As the Univariate distances between abnormal phases and the normal
DTW technique distorts series in time to find the shortest cluster medoid will be evaluated based on intra-cluster
matching path, the time to the end of the cycle is inserted as a distance mean and standard deviation. The importance score
new dimension in the dataset of series. This dimension will not of a parameter i in the identification of an abnormal phase j is
be normalized like the rest of the variables to give greater calculated using the following pseudocode:
weight to time. Thus, the deformation in time will penalize the
For each signal 𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖
DTW distance since time has a higher average value.
Calculate the variance of univariate distance to normal
2.2.2 DBSCAN clustering medoid within normal cluster

The choice of DBSCAN technique is especially motivated by For each abnormal profile 𝑗𝑗𝑗𝑗
its powerful ability to extract clusters with arbitrary shapes For each signal 𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖
where a cluster may be expanded if its neighbors are dense. Calculate importance score of signal i in the
Using this technique, the unclassed elements may represent identification of profile 𝑗𝑗𝑗𝑗
anomalies. The DBSCAN clustering algorithm requires two
parameters: Eps which represents the minimum distance Once the profiles are statistically validated, aircraft experts are
between two time series to consider them as neighbors and involved to interpret the obtained diagnosis variables of each
MinPts which denotes the minimum number of series required anomaly by comparing them to potential symptoms.
Mohamed Ben Slimene et al. / IFAC PapersOnLine 55-10 (2022) 1582–1587 1585

2.4 Step-4: Anomaly detection series of different classes. This technique uses a transformer to
extract 3 statistical features from each window of the series:
Step-3 proposes a new anomaly detection model based on 2
the mean, the standard deviation, and the decay slope. This
stages (Figure 2):
transformer divides the time series into several windows and
• Stage-1. New profile detection. This stage detects whether calculates the 3 features at each interval. The extracted
a new phase corresponds to a known profile using the variables are used as inputs to a random forest that randomly
silhouette test or not. samples the 3 variables from the intervals at each node of the
tree. To enable better classification, Random Forest uses a
• Stage-2. Profile classification. This stage predicts the combination of entropy gain and a distance measure, called
phase’s profile in the case of a known system behavior input gain (entropy and distance), to assess separation at each
using the Time Series Forest (TSF) classifier. node (Deng et al., 2013).
Since we are dealing with a highly imbalanced dataset (the
number of abnormal elements is very small compared to
normal elements), time series augmentation is performed on
minority profiles by adding white noise to rare abnormal
phases. We then train multiple Time Series Forest on both
augmented abnormal elements and a subset of the normal
cluster. The final classification result will be the majority vote
of these models. K-fold cross-validation technique is applied
to train and evaluate the classification model based on the
classification precision and recall.
Figure 2. Anomaly detection flowchart
3. STUDY CASE
2.4.1 New profile detection The case study deals with an aircraft system during a specific
To test if a new phase can fit correctly in one of the predefined flight phase. The data is stored in Bombardier’s Aircraft
profiles (normal and abnormal), we perform a silhouette test. Health Management System (AHMS), which provides a large
amount of monitoring variables that can give us insights on
It consists of assigning the new time series to each of the normal and abnormal operation modes of the aircraft.
clusters and calculating its silhouette score. This score will be
compared to a predefined silhouette threshold for each profile 3.1 Phases extraction results
based on scores achieved by correctly classified phases. The sample dataset contains full flight sessions recorded for
one year. The sample contains all recommended variables that
For a given profile j, the silhouette threshold is 𝑆𝑆𝑆𝑆𝑇𝑇𝑇𝑇𝑗𝑗𝑗𝑗 = µ𝑗𝑗𝑗𝑗 −
are used by aircraft experts for diagnosing the system failures.
3σj , where: µ𝑗𝑗𝑗𝑗 is the average silhouette of correctly classified The time window that delimits the phase relative to each flight
phases in profile 𝑗𝑗𝑗𝑗 and σj is the standard deviation of silhouette session is given by the by the experts. After the extraction of
score corresponding to correctly classified phases of the same phases from whole flight sessions, we ended up with a
profile. The novelty behind the proposed clustering technique database containing multivariate time series. We pre-
consists of leveraging the silhouette score to detect unknown processed extracted phases by resampling time series and by
profiles. The following pseudo code illustrates the proposed interpolating missing values.
technique.
3.2 Normal and abnormal profiles identification results
Exist = 0
For each profile After extracting and pre-processing data, we perform 2
Assign the new phase to the cluster iterations of the DNSCAN algorithm (Step-2 of the method) to
Calculate phase’s silhouette score extract normal profiles as well as abnormal ones. Before
If silhouette score > profile’s silhouette threshold then performing clustering analysis on the extracted dataset, several
Return (Exist = 1) preliminary tests were performed on a sub-sample of 9% of
Return (Exist) phases which correspond to the most recent complete sessions.
In the case of a new abnormal profile, a new cluster will be Several combinations of segmentation techniques such as
created. Otherwise, the Time Series Forest classifier is Piecewise Aggregate Approximation (PAA) and Symbolic
employed to predict the new phase’s cluster. Aggregate approximation (SAX) with Dynamic Time warping
(DTW) and Euclidean distances were tested together with the
2.4.2 Existing profile classification DBSCAN clustering algorithm are used to choose the best
Regarding the profile prediction, a variant of random forests clustering approach in terms of partition quality measured by
called Time Series Forest (TSF), will be used to regenerate the the silhouette score. The minimum number of phases to build
classification labels. The model receives as input the a cluster MinPts is set to 2 elements to be able to extract small
multivariate signal series and returns the corresponding behavioral profiles. Table 1 summarizes clustering results for
profile. TSF is an accurate and efficient time series classifier each combination of techniques after tuning the Epsilon
that can extract the temporal features that distinguishes time hyperparameter.
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The best result was achieved by applying the DTW distance of the 9 abnormal profiles (red color) for the most important
on the PAA phases’ segments with a silhouette of 0.508. Also, variable.
we tried the PAA and the SAX warping distances, which did
not improve the partition quality. Since Euclidian distance
requires the same number of observations in the time series to
compare, we used it to cluster time series represented with both
techniques. Using the Euclidian distance, the best result was
achieved by the PAA segmentation with a silhouette score of
0.506. However, using the proposed DTW distance with non-
normalized time dimension gives the best silhouette score of
0.958. Based on previous preliminary results, the DTW
distance with non-normalized time to phase end together with
DBSCAN algorithm are applied on all data. This clustering
configuration has extracted one normal profile and 18
abnormal ones.
Table 1. Clustering results for phases sample Figure 3. Most important variable for profile 9

Metric S.tech. Eps Silh. # clus. # anom. A shown in Figure 3, the abnormal signal for profile 9 is much
None 96 0.465 1 1 higher than the normal one. A similar analysis has been carried
DTW PAA 12 0.508 1 1 out for all the abnormal profiles. For example, Figure 4 depicts
the profile 2 where it is easy to notice a time shift between the
SAX 23 0.214 1 1
normal and abnormal signals.
PAA warping PAA 180 0.506 1 1
SAX warping SAX 70 0.222 1 1
Euclidean PAA 12 0.506 1 1
Distance SAX 23 0.207 1 1
DTW with None 95 0.471 1 1
normalized PAA 12 0.507 1 1
time
SAX 23 0.225 1 1
DTW with None 800 0.958 1 18
non- PAA 81 0.889 1 4
normalized
time SAX 81 0.732 1 5
Figure 4. Most important variable for profile 2
After the isolation of the abnormal phases, a re-clustering is To validate the obtained normal and abnormal clusters,
performed on the unclassified elements to determinate the investigations are conducted on many other variables and
abnormal profiles and to facilitate interpretation. The same presented to the system expert to capture its feedback
DBSCAN algorithm is applied with a smaller minimum regarding the extracted profiles.
number of phases to consider a cluster (MinPts = 2). Thus, 9
abnormal profiles are found with a silhouette score of 0.80. 3.4 Build anomaly detection model
Abnormal phases distribution among abnormal profiles is
Before building the anomaly detection model, many
illustrated in Table 2.
techniques are applied to accurately detect anomalies. For
Table 2. Abnormal phases distribution of abnormal profiles example, we tried training and optimizing a deep LSTM
autoencoder as well as on reconstructing normal phases. This
Abnormal profile # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 technique was not effective due to the overlap between normal
Number of phases 2 2 2 4 2 2 2 1 1 and abnormal phases reconstruction error histograms. We tried
other techniques such as the K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN)
3.3 Profile characterization results classifier coupled with modified DTW distance. Also, we
Ranking signals based on their contribution in the trained a one-class SVM on statistical features extracted from
identification of abnormal profile is the key to diagnose each phases time windows. But these two techniques achieved a
of the potential failures. The profile characterization of each classification accuracy of less than 50%. Since these
cluster is represented with its medoid. Hence, 1 normal medoid techniques failed to detect abnormalities with acceptable
and 9 abnormal ones are found. Based on the importance score accuracy, we applied the new anomaly detection model based
of each variable of the multivariate times series, for each on the silhouette test (Stage-1) and the Time Series Forest
abnormal profile, a ranking of its variables is given to facilitate classifier (Stage-2) according to the flowchart presented in
their interpretation. Figure 3 illustrates an example of the Figure 2. The results of Stage-1 are presented in Figure 4
normal medoid phase (green color) and the abnormal medoid where the silhouette score histogram of the normal profile
when we assign abnormal phases to is plotted and compared to
Mohamed Ben Slimene et al. / IFAC PapersOnLine 55-10 (2022) 1582–1587 1587

the silhouette threshold for that cluster (blue line). According ACKNOWLEGEMENTS
to Figure 4, it is easy to choose a silhouette threshold to
The authors would like to thank Hugo Gagnon, Kerelous
separate normal classes from misclassified classes. In this case
Waghen, and Thomas Reid from Bombardier Aeronautic for
the threshold is set to 0.275 (µ = 0.958, σ = 0.227) ). Hence,
their valuable contributions and the richness of the scientific
18 abnormal phases are correctly detected. Likewise, if we
exchanges throughout the project.
misclassify a phase to the wrong abnormal profile, its
silhouette score will be much lower than other phases. The project is supported by the Mitacs-accelarate program
under grant number IT23277.
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