Self-Learning and Efficient Health-Status Analysis for a Core Router System

The health status of core router systems needs to be analyzed efficiently in order to ensure high reliability and timely error recovery. Although a large amount operational data is collected from core routers, due to high computational complexity and expensive labor cost, only a small part of this data is labeled by experts. The lack of labels is an impediment toward the adoption of supervised learning. We present an iterative self-learning procedure for assessing the health status of a core router. This procedure first computes a representative feature matrix to capture different characteristics of time-series data. Not only statistical-modeling-based features are computed from three general categories but also a recurrent neural network-based autoencoder is utilized to capture a wider range of hidden patterns. Moreover, both minimum-redundancy-maximum-relevance (mRMR) method and fully connected feedforward autoencoder are applied to further reduce dimensionality of extracted feature matrix. Hierarchical clustering is then utilized to infer labels for the unlabeled dataset. Finally, a classifier is built and iteratively updated using both labeled and unlabeled dataset. Field data collected from a set of commercial core routers are used to experimentally validate the proposed health-status analyzer. The experimental results show that the proposed feature-based self-learning health analyzer achieves higher precision and recall than the traditional supervised health analyzer as well the currently deployed rule-based health analyzer. Moreover, it achieves better performance than the three anomaly detection baseline methods under the transformed binary classification scenario.