Bio-inspired algorithm for outliers detection

An essential activity to obtain valuable information to identify, for example, intrusions, faults, system failures, etc, is outliers detection. This paper proposes a bio-inspired algorithm able to detect anomaly data in distributed systems. Each data object is associated with a mobile agent that follows the well-known bio-inspired algorithm of flocking. The agents are randomly disseminated onto a virtual space where they move autonomously in order to form one or more flocks. Through a tailored similarity function, the agents associated with similar objects join in the same flock, whereas, the agents associated with dissimilar objects do not join in any flock. The objects associated with isolated agents or associated with agents grouped into flock with a number of entities lower than a given threshold, represent the outliers. Experimental results on synthetic and real data sets confirm the validity of the approach.