AI Solutions for MDS: Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Misuse Detection and Localisation in Telecommunication Environments

This report considers the application of Articial Intelligence (AI) techniques to the problem of misuse detection and misuse localisation within telecommunications environments. A broad survey of techniques is provided, that covers inter alia rule based systems, model-based systems, case based reasoning, pattern matching, clustering and feature extraction, articial neural networks, genetic algorithms, arti cial immune systems, agent based systems, data mining and a variety of hybrid approaches. The report then considers the central issue of event correlation, that is at the heart of many misuse detection and localisation systems. The notion of being able to infer misuse by the correlation of individual temporally distributed events within a multiple data stream environment is explored, and a range of techniques, covering model based approaches, `programmed' AI and machine learning paradigms. It is found that, in general, correlation is best achieved via rule based approaches, but that these suffer from a number of drawbacks, such as the difculty of developing and maintaining an appropriate knowledge base, and the lack of ability to generalise from known misuses to new unseen misuses. Two distinct approaches are evident. One attempts to encode knowledge of known misuses, typically within rules, and use this to screen events. This approach cannot generally detect misuses for which it has not been programmed, i.e. it is prone to issuing false negatives. The other attempts to `learn' the features of event patterns that constitute normal behaviour, and, by observing patterns that do not match expected behaviour, detect when a misuse has occurred. This approach is prone to issuing false positives, i.e. inferring misuse from innocent patterns of behaviour that the system was not trained to recognise. Contemporary approaches are seen to favour hybridisation, often combining detection or localisation mechanisms for both abnormal and normal behaviour, the former to capture known cases of misuse, the latter to capture unknown cases. In some systems, these mechanisms even work together to update each other to increase detection rates and lower false positive rates. It is concluded that hybridisation offers the most promising future direction, but that a rule or state based component is likely to remain, being the most natural approach to the correlation of complex events. The challenge, then, is to mitigate the weaknesses of canonical programmed systems such that learning, generalisation and adaptation are more readily facilitated

Fraud Detection in Telecommunications Industry: Bridging the Gap with Random Rough Subspace Based Neural Network Ensemble Method

Fraud has been very common in the society and it affects private enterprises as well as public entities. Telecommunication companies worldwide suffer from customers who use the provided services without paying. There are also different types of telecommunication fraud such as subscription fraud, clip on fraud, call forwarding, cloning fraud, roaming fraud and calling card fraud. Thus, detection and prevention of these frauds are the main targets of the telecommunication industry. This paper addresses the various techniques of detecting fraud, giving the limitations of each technique and proposes random rough subspace-based neural network ensemble method for effective fraud detection. Keywords: Fraud, Fraud detection, Random rough subspace, Neural network, Telecommunication

Telecommunication Fraud and Detection Techniques: A Review

Fraud is one of the major concerns in Telecommunication industry. Due to dramatic increase in number of frauds which accounts for high revenue loss to the government, many fraud detection techniques have evolved recently. The intent of the paper is to review different kinds of frauds and corresponding detection techniques

Determining an Appropriate Weight attribute in Fraud Call Rate Data Using Case Based Reasoning

Fraud cases are significantly causing huge revenue losses in telecommunication companies around the world. Although previous cases are very important data in dealing with fraud patterns, there are variations in the dataset of different fraud case scenarios which in turns need specific detection system without necessarily involving the domain expert directly. This paper investigates the appropriate weight values for attributes using fraud Call Rate Data that is based on Artificial Intelligence technique (Case Based Reasoning) with a meaningful confidence in telecommunication data. The experimental result on the fraud data reports that the weight for all attribute used in this study needs to be set at 0.9 in order to get the best performance of 98.33%

From one-class to two-class classification by incorporating expert knowledge : novelty detection in human behaviour

One-class classification is the standard procedure for novelty detection. Novelty detection aims to identify observations that deviate from a determined normal behaviour. Only instances of one class are known, whereas so called novelties are unlabelled. Traditional novelty detection applies methods from the field of outlier detection. These standard one-class classification approaches have limited performance in many real business cases. The traditional techniques are mainly developed for industrial problems such as machine condition monitoring. When applying these to human behaviour, the performance drops significantly. This paper proposes a method that improves existing approaches by creating semi-synthetic novelties in order to have labelled data for the two classes. Expert knowledge is incorporated in the initial phase of this data generation process. The method was deployed on a real-life test case where the goal was to detect fraudulent subscriptions to a telecom family plan. This research demonstrates that the two-class expert model outperforms a one-class model on the semi-synthetic dataset. In a next step the model was validated on a real dataset. A fraud detection team of the company manually checked the top predicted novelties. The results show that incorporating expert knowledge to transform a one-class problem into a two-class problem is a valuable method

A Comprehensive Survey of Data Mining-based Fraud Detection Research

This survey paper categorises, compares, and summarises from almost all published technical and review articles in automated fraud detection within the last 10 years. It defines the professional fraudster, formalises the main types and subtypes of known fraud, and presents the nature of data evidence collected within affected industries. Within the business context of mining the data to achieve higher cost savings, this research presents methods and techniques together with their problems. Compared to all related reviews on fraud detection, this survey covers much more technical articles and is the only one, to the best of our knowledge, which proposes alternative data and solutions from related domains.Comment: 14 page

Building an Effective Representation for Dynamic Networks

A dynamic network is a special type of network composed of connected transactors which have repeated evolving interaction. Data on large dynamic networks such as telecommunications networks and the Internet are pervasive. However, representing dynamic networks in a manner that is conducive to efficient large-scale analysis is a challenge. In this article, we represent dynamic graphs using a data structure introduced in an earlier article. We advocate their representation because it accounts for the evolution of relationships between transactors through time, mitigates noise at the local transactor level, and allows for the removal of stale relationships. Our work improves on their heuristic arguments by formalizing the representation with three tunable parameters. In doing this, we develop a generic framework for evaluating and tuning any dynamic graph. We show that the storage saving approximations involved in the representation do not affect predictive performance, and typically improve it. We motivate our approach using a fraud detection example from the telecommunications industry, and demonstrate that we can outperform published results on the fraud detection task. In addition, we present a preliminary analysis on Web logs and e-mail networks