Unsupervised Anomaly Detection and Root Cause Analysis in HFC Networks : A Clustering Approach

Abstract: Following the significant transition from the traditional production industry to an informationbased economy, the telecommunications industry was faced with an explosion of innovation, resulting in a continuous change in user behaviour. The industry has made efforts to adapt to a more datadriven future, which has given rise to larger and more complex systems. Therefore, troubleshooting systems such as anomaly detection and root cause analysis are essential features for maintaining service quality and facilitating daily operations. This study aims to explore the possibilities, benefits, and drawbacks of implementing cluster analysis for anomaly detection in hybrid fibercoaxial networks. Based on the literature review on unsupervised anomaly detection and an assumption regarding the anomalous behaviour in hybrid fibercoaxial network data, the kmeans, SelfOrganizing Map, and Gaussian Mixture Model were implemented both with and without Principal Component Analysis. Analysis of the results demonstrated an increase in performance for all models when the Principal Component Analysis was applied, with kmeans outperforming both SelfOrganizing Map and Gaussian Mixture Model. On this basis, it is recommended to apply Principal Component Analysis for clusteringbased anomaly detection. Further research is necessary to identify whether cluster analysis is the most appropriate unsupervised anomaly detection approach.