Award Abstract # 2103832
Collaborative Research: ELEMENTS: Tuning-free Anomaly Detection Service

NSF Org: OAC
Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC)
Recipient: WORCESTER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE
Initial Amendment Date: March 22, 2021
Latest Amendment Date: May 21, 2021
Award Number: 2103832
Award Instrument: Standard Grant
Program Manager: Marlon Pierce
mpierce@nsf.gov
 (703)292-7743
OAC
 Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC)
CSE
 Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering
Start Date: May 1, 2021
End Date: April 30, 2026 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount: $259,651.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date: $259,651.00
Funds Obligated to Date: FY 2021 = $259,651.00
History of Investigator:
  • Elke Rundensteiner (Principal Investigator)
    rundenst@wpi.edu
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: Worcester Polytechnic Institute
100 INSTITUTE RD
WORCESTER
MA  US  01609-2280
(508)831-5000
Sponsor Congressional District: 02
Primary Place of Performance: Worcester Polytechnic Institute
100 Institute Road
Worcester
MA  US  01609-2247
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
02
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): HJNQME41NBU4
Parent UEI:
NSF Program(s): Data Cyberinfrastructure,
Software Institutes
Primary Program Source: 01002122DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s): 077Z, 7923
Program Element Code(s): 772600, 800400
Award Agency Code: 4900
Fund Agency Code: 4900
Assistance Listing Number(s): 47.070

ABSTRACT

Finding and understanding anomalous behavior in data is important in many applications. A large number of anomaly detection algorithms exist, and it can be difficult to determine which algorithm is best suited to a particular domain. And once an algorithm is selected, users must tune many parameters manually to get the algorithm to perform well; this requires in-depth knowledge of the machine learning process and an understanding of the trade-offs among different algorithms to select the best performing approach. To address these difficulties, this team develops a package that can test a range of unsupervised anomaly detection techniques on a dataset, explore options to identify best-fit, and classify anomalies with higher accuracy than manual tuning.

The project will automatically test a range of unsupervised anomaly techniques on a data set, extract knowledge from the combined detection results to reliably distinguish between anomalies and normal data, and use this knowledge as labels to train an anomaly classifier; the goal is to classify anomalies with an accuracy higher than what is achievable by thorough manual tuning. The approach can be applied across of a range of data types and domains. The resulting cyberinfrastructure provides tuning-free anomaly detection capabilities while making it easy to incorporate domain-specific requirements. It enables scientists and engineers having little experience with anomaly detection techniques to steer the anomaly detection process with domain expertise. Evaluation of the unsupervised anomaly detection package will use data sets and partnerships with collaborators from the Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, Cyber Security research, and Signify (formerly Philips Lighting) to ensure that the utility and usability of the package is verified throughout the development process.

This award by the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure is jointly supported by the NSF Division of Information and Intelligent Systems within the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

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Hofmann, Dennis and VanNostrand, Peter and Zhang, Huayi and Yan, Yizhou and Cao, Lei and Madden, Samuel and Rundensteiner, Elke "A demonstration of AutoOD: a self-tuning anomaly detection system" Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment , v.15 , 2022 https://doi.org/10.14778/3554821.3554880 Citation Details
Hofmann, Dennis M and VanNostrand, Peter M and Ma, Lei and Zhang, Huayi and DeOliveira, Joshua C and Cao, Lei and Rundensteiner, Elke A "Agree to Disagree: Robust Anomaly Detection with Noisy Labels" Proceedings of the ACM on Management of Data , v.3 , 2025 https://doi.org/10.1145/3709657 Citation Details
Zhang, Huayi and Cao, Lei and VanNostrand, Peter and Madden, Samuel and Rundensteiner, Elke A. "ELITE: Robust Deep Anomaly Detection with Meta Gradient" KDD '21: Proceedings of the 27th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining , 2021 https://doi.org/10.1145/3447548.3467320 Citation Details
Zhang, Huayi and Cao, Lei and Madden, Samuel and Rundensteiner, Elke "LANCET: labeling complex data at scale" Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment , v.14 , 2021 https://doi.org/10.14778/3476249.3476269 Citation Details
Ma, Lei and Cao, Lei and VanNostrand, Peter M and Hofmann, Dennis M and Su, Yao and Rundensteiner, Elke A "Pluto: Sample Selection for Robust Anomaly Detection on Polluted Log Data" Proceedings of the ACM on Management of Data , v.2 , 2024 https://doi.org/10.1145/3677139 Citation Details
Ma, Lei and Cao, Lei and VanNostrand, Peter M and Hofmann, Dennis M and Su, Yao and Rundensteiner, Elke A "Pluto: Sample Selection for Robust Anomaly Detection on Polluted Log Data" Proceedings of the ACM on Management of Data , v.2 , 2024 Citation Details
Cao, Lei and Yan, Yizhou and Wang, Yu and Madden, Samuel and Rundensteiner, Elke A. "AutoOD: Automatic Outlier Detection" Proceedings of the ACM on Management of Data , v.1 , 2023 https://doi.org/10.1145/3588700 Citation Details

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