Modern aircraft are producing data at an unprecedented rate with hundreds of parameters being recorded on a second by second basis. The data can be used for studying the condition of the hardware systems of the aircraft and also for studying the complex interactions between the pilot and the aircraft. NASA is developing novel data mining algorithms to detect precursors to aviation safety incidents from these data sources. This talk will cover the theoretical aspects of the algorithms and practical aspects of implementing these techniques to study one of the most complex dynamical systems in the world: the national airspace.

The worldwide civilian aviation system is one of the most complex dynamical systems created. Most modern commercial aircraft have onboard flight data recorders that record several hundred discrete and continuous parameters at approximately 1Hz for the entire duration of the flight. These data contain information about the flight control systems, actuators, engines, landing gear, avionics, and pilot commands. In this paper, recent advances in the development of a novel knowledge discovery process consisting of a suite of data mining techniques for identifying precursors to aviation safety incidents are discussed. The data mining techniques include scalable multiple-kernel learning for large-scale distributed anomaly detection. A novel multivariate time-series search algorithm is used to search for signatures of discovered anomalies on massive datasets. The process can identify operationally significant events due to environmental, mechanical, and human factors issues in the high-dimensional flight operations quality assurance data. All discovered anomalies are validated by a team of independent domain experts. This novel automated knowledge discovery process is aimed at complementing the state-of-the-art human-generated exceedance-based analysis that fails to discover previously unknown aviation safety incidents. In this paper, the discovery pipeline, the methods used, and some of the significant anomalies detected on real-world commercial aviation data are discussed.

Published at 12th AIAA Aviation Technology, Integration, and Operations (ATIO) Conference and 14th AIAA/ISSM 17 - 19 September 2012, Indianapolis, Indiana

ANALYZING AVIATION SAFETY REPORTS: FROM TOPIC MODELING TO SCALABLE MULTI-LABEL CLASSIFICATION AMRUDIN AGOVIC*, HANHUAI SHAN*, AND ARINDAM BANERJEE* Abstract. The Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) is used to collect voluntarily submitted aviation safety reports from pilots, controllers and others. As such it is particularly useful in researching aviation safety deficiencies. In this paper we address two challenges related to the analysis of ASRS data: (1) the unsupervised extraction of meaningful and interpretable topics from ASRS reports and (2) multi-label classification of ASRS data based on a set of predefined categories. For topic modeling we investigate the practical usefulness of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) when it comes to modeling ASRS reports in terms of interpretable topics. We also utilize LDA to generate a more compact representation of ASRS reports to be used in multi-label classification. For multi-label classification we propose a novel and highly scalable multi-label classification algorithm based on multi-variate regression. Empirical results indicate that our approach is superior to several baseline and state-of-the-art approaches.

A sampling of altitude deviation reports.