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Uncovering network traffic anomalies based on their sparse distributions

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Abstract

Characterizing network traffic with higher-dimensional features results in increased complexity of most detectors and classifiers for identifying traffic anomalies. Several key observations from existing studies confirm that network anomalies are typically distributed in a sparse way, with each anomaly essentially characterized by its lower-dimensional features. Based on this important finding, we exploit sparsity in designing a novel detection method for anomalies that ignores redundancies that are dynamically filtered from the feature sets and accurately classifies anomalies. Comparison of our method with three well known techniques shows a 10% improvement in accuracy with an O (n) complexity of the classifier.

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Correspondence to GuoZhen Cheng.

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Cheng, G., Chen, H., Cheng, D. et al. Uncovering network traffic anomalies based on their sparse distributions. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 57, 1–11 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-014-5087-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-014-5087-7

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