language: en

[Appears in Proceedings of the 4 th International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, AAAI Press, 1998, 359-363.]

Learning to Predict Rare Events in Event Sequences

Gary M. Weiss and Haym Hirsh
Department of Computer Science Rutgers University
New Brunswick, NJ 08903
gmweiss@att.com, hirsh@cs.rutgers.edu

Abstract Learning to predict rare events from sequences of events with categorical features is an important, real-world, problem that existing statistical and machine learning methods are not well suited to solve. This paper describes timeweaver, a genetic algorithm based machine learning system that predicts rare events by identifying predictive temporal and sequential patterns. Timeweaver is applied to the task of predicting telecommunication equipment failures from 110,000 alarm messages and is shown to outperform existing learning methods.

Introduction