Detecting anomalies in spatio-temporal flow data by constructing dynamic neighbourhoods

- The proposed algorithm is designed for anomaly detection in spatio-temporal flow data.
- The spatio-temporal neighbourhoods are constructed based on the modelling of dynamic flow.
- The proposed algorithm can accurately detect global and local spatio-temporal flow anomalies.

In massive spatio-temporal datasets, anomalies that deviate from the global or local distributions are not just useless noise but possibly imply significant changes, surprising patterns, and meaningful insights, and because of this, detection of spatio-temporal anomalies has become an important research hotspot in spatio-temporal data mining. For spatio-temporal flow data (e.g., traffic flow data), the existing anomaly detection methods cannot handle the embedded dynamic characteristic. Therefore, this paper proposes the approach of constructing dynamic neighbourhoods to detect the anomalies in spatio-temporal flow data (called spatio-temporal flow anomalies). In this approach, the dynamic spatio-temporal flow is first modelled based on the real-time attribute values of the flow data, e.g., the velocity of vehicles. The dynamic neighbourhoods are then constructed by considering attribute similarity in the spatio-temporal flow. On this basis, global and local anomalies are detected by employing the idea of the G⁎ statistic and the problem of multiple hypothesis testing is further addressed to control the false discovery rate. The effectiveness and practicality of our proposed approach are demonstrated through comparative experiments on traffic flow data from the central road network of central London for both weekdays and weekends.