Fujitsu and France’s Inria Develop New Time-Series AI Technology to Identify Causes of Data Anomalies
July 19, 2021 -- Fujitsu Limited and Inria, the French national research institute for digital science and technology, today announced the development of a new AI technology that can identify factors contributing to anomalies in time series data.
In recent years, various kinds of time-series data collected in fields including healthcare, social infrastructure, and manufacturing have been leveraged by AI to perform situational judgment and detect anomalies. In the case of time-series data, however, there are a wide range of factors that can contribute to AI decision-making. This means that even experts find it difficult to notice what kind of changes in the data contributed to an anomaly detection making it difficult to take appropriate measures to prevent their occurrence.
Fujitsu and Inria, more specifically the Inria’s DATASHAPE Project Team led by Frédéric Chazal in France, have now successfully developed a new technology based on Topological Data Analysis (TDA) that can identify the factors contributing to anomaly detections by AI for time series data and visualize the differences in AI decisions during normal and anomalous circumstances.
Fujitsu and Inria anticipate that this will contribute to the analysis of the causes of anomalies in time series data for various phenomena, clarifying the mechanism surrounding the occurrence of anomalies, as well as the discovery of new solutions to these.
This technology will be presented as one of just 3% of total submitted papers as a “Long Talk” presentation at the Thirty-eighth International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), the leading international conference in the field of machine learning, which opens virtually from July 18th, 2021.
Newly Developed Technology
Fujitsu and Inria have developed an AI technology that can determine the cause of anomalies in time-series data, consisting of the following key features.
1) Using an analysis technology developed by Fujitsu that extract features that affect judgement from time-series data and detects anomalies, the characteristics that led to the anomalous judgment as well as the unrelated characteristics from the data that was judged to be anomalous by the AI are mapped onto a plane (TDA space).
2) The technology transforms the point data of the characteristic that is the cause closer to the point data group of the characteristic that is not the cause on the plane.
3) The time-series data is deformed based on the conversion of the characteristics of the point data, and the data judged to be normal is generated.
This allows the waveform of normal and anomalous time-series data to be compared and enables the user to visually investigate the cause of the anomaly.
The newly developed technology was applied to test the possibility of detecting symptoms of delirium using actual electroencephalography (EEG) data collected in strict accordance with ethical guidelines. Using the newly developed technology, it was confirmed that the characteristics of the brain wave of the time series data coincided with the “slowing” phenomenon that at times accompanies the state of delirium. These results offer the potential to help medical professionals interpret the data to help determine the cause of these symptoms. This may one day contribute to important medical developments, including the ability to discover possible precursors to diseases that have been difficult to identify with conventional techniques, as well as the discovery of preventive treatments. The technology could also be applied to shed light on the mechanisms of diseases that are not yet well-understood.
Future Plans
Fujitsu and Inria plan to encourage the use of the jointly developed technology in field work and experiments at companies and research institutes, and proceed with verifying the technology.
Source: Fujitsu
