A comprehensive study of machine learning techniques for log-based anomaly detection
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Growth in system complexity increases the need for automated techniques dedicated to different log analysis tasks such as Log-based Anomaly Detection (LAD). The latter has been widely addressed in the literature, mostly by means of a variety of deep learning techniques. However, despite their many advantages, that focus on deep learning techniques is somewhat arbitrary as traditional Machine Learning (ML) techniques may perform well in many cases, depending on the context and datasets. In the same vein, semi-supervised techniques deserve the same attention as supervised techniques since the former have clear practical advantages. Further, current evaluations mostly rely on the assessment of detection accuracy. However, this is not enough to decide whether or not a specific ML technique is suitable to address the LAD problem in a given context. Other aspects to consider include training and prediction times as well as the sensitivity to hyperparameter tuning, which in practice matters to engineers. In this paper, we present a comprehensive empirical study, in which we evaluate a wide array of supervised and semi-supervised, traditional and deep ML techniques w.r.t. four evaluation criteria: detection accuracy, time performance, sensitivity of detection accuracy and time performance to hyperparameter tuning. Our goal is to provide much stronger and comprehensive evidence regarding the relative advantages and drawbacks of alternative techniques for LAD. The experimental results show that supervised traditional and deep ML techniques fare similarly in terms of their detection accuracy and prediction time on most of the benchmark datasets considered in our study. Moreover, overall, sensitivity analysis to hyperparameter tuning with respect to detection accuracy shows that supervised traditional ML techniques are less sensitive than deep learning techniques. Further, semi-supervised techniques yield significantly worse detection accuracy than supervised techniques.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it