Approaches to online learning and concept drift for user identification in computer security

Abstract

The task in the computer security domain of anomaly detection is to characterize the behaviors of a computer user (the valid', or normal' user) so that unusual occurrences can be detected by comparison of the current input stream to the valid user's profile. This task requires an online learning system that can respond to concept drift and handle discrete non-metric time sequence data. We present an architecture for online learning in the anomaly detection domain and address the issues of incremental updating of system parameters and instance selection. We demonstrate a method for measuring direction and magnitude of concept drift in the classification space and present and evaluate approaches to the above stated issues which make use of the drift measurement. Introduction In this paper we examine methods for learning to classify temporal sequences of nominal data as similar to or different from previously observed sequence data when the underlying concept is subject to drift. This pr...