Incident Management for Explainable and Automated Root Cause Analysis in Cloud Data Centers

Effective root cause analysis (RCA) of performance issues in modern cloud environ- ments remains a hard problem. Traditional RCA tracks complex issues by their signatures known as problem incidents. Common approaches to incident discovery rely mainly on expertise of users who define environment-specific set of alerts and >target detection of problems through their occurrence in the monitoring system. Adequately modeling of all possible problem patterns for nowadays extremely sophisticated data center applications is a very complex task. It may result in alert/event storms including large numbers of non-indicative precautions. Thus, the crucial task for the incident-based RCA is reduction of redundant recommendations by prioritizing those events subject to importance/impact criteria or by deriving their meaningful groupings into separable situations. In this paper, we consider automation of incident discovery based on rule induction algorithms that retrieve conditions directly from monitoring datasets without consuming the sys- tem events. Rule-learning algorithms are very flexible and powerful for many regression and classification problems, with high-level explainability. Since annotated or labeled data sets are mostly unavailable in this area of technology, we discuss data self-labelling principles which allow transforming originally unsupervised learning tasks into classification problems with further application of rule induction methods to incident detection.

An Empirical Investigation Into Deep and Shallow Rule Learning

Inductive rule learning is arguably among the most traditional paradigms in machine learning. Although we have seen considerable progress over the years in learning rule-based theories, all state-of-the-art learners still learn descriptions that directly relate the input features to the target concept. In the simplest case, concept learning, this is a disjunctive normal form (DNF) description of the positive class. While it is clear that this is sufficient from a logical point of view because every logical expression can be reduced to an equivalent DNF expression, it could nevertheless be the case that more structured representations, which form deep theories by forming intermediate concepts, could be easier to learn, in very much the same way as deep neural networks are able to outperform shallow networks, even though the latter are also universal function approximators. However, there are several non-trivial obstacles that need to be overcome before a sufficiently powerful deep rule learning algorithm could be developed and be compared to the state-of-the-art in inductive rule learning. In this paper, we therefore take a different approach: we empirically compare deep and shallow rule sets that have been optimized with a uniform general mini-batch based optimization algorithm. In our experiments on both artificial and real-world benchmark data, deep rule networks outperformed their shallow counterparts, which we take as an indication that it is worth-while to devote more efforts to learning deep rule structures from data.

Achieving effective customer relationship using frequent pattern-growth algorithm association rule learning technique

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a methodology and tool that possesses the plan and techniques that companies should follow in relating with their customers. In today’s business world, the relationship between organizations and their customers is very important in engaging the customers’ interest, which has the direct effect in increasing the business profit. Due to ineffective collaboration and interaction between organizations and their customers, identifying who the real customers are, along with what they need has failed. A breach of trust from the company, and lack of feedback from the customer could make an organization not to be able to compete with her rivals in a business environment and win her customers’ loyalty. Therefore, the guarantee of the customer continuing transactions with the company may no longer be assured. This work deploys an association rule learning technique of data mining using frequent pattern growth algorithm to identify which items are regularly purchased together by customers and based on this result, analyzes and understands the customers’ buying habits. Object-Oriented Analysis and Design methodology (OOAD) is used to analyze and design the system, whereas the implementation is carried out using Python programming language and My-SQL database management system. The contribution of this work is that it enables firms to gather and analyze customers’ interests in a product so that the needs of their valued customers will be met in order to make them return for more business transactions, thereby achieving customer retention.

Infants differentially extract rules from language

Infants readily extract linguistic rules from speech. Here, we ask whether this advantage extends to linguistic stimuli that do not rely on the spoken modality. To address this question, we first examine whether infants can differentially learn rules from linguistic signs. We show that, despite having no previous experience with a sign language, six-month-old infants can extract the reduplicative rule (AA) from dynamic linguistic signs, and the neural response to reduplicative linguistic signs differs from reduplicative visual controls, matched for the dynamic spatiotemporal properties of signs. We next demonstrate that the brain response for reduplicative signs is similar to the response to reduplicative speech stimuli. Rule learning, then, apparently depends on the linguistic status of the stimulus, not its sensory modality. These results suggest that infants are language-ready. They possess a powerful rule system that is differentially engaged by all linguistic stimuli, speech or sign.

Language statistical learning responds to reinforcement learning principles rooted in the striatum

Statistical learning (SL) is the ability to extract regularities from the environment. In the domain of language, this ability is fundamental in the learning of words and structural rules. In lack of reliable online measures, statistical word and rule learning have been primarily investigated using offline (post-familiarization) tests, which gives limited insights into the dynamics of SL and its neural basis. Here, we capitalize on a novel task that tracks the online SL of simple syntactic structures combined with computational modeling to show that online SL responds to reinforcement learning principles rooted in striatal function. Specifically, we demonstrate—on 2 different cohorts—that a temporal difference model, which relies on prediction errors, accounts for participants’ online learning behavior. We then show that the trial-by-trial development of predictions through learning strongly correlates with activity in both ventral and dorsal striatum. Our results thus provide a detailed mechanistic account of language-related SL and an explanation for the oft-cited implication of the striatum in SL tasks. This work, therefore, bridges the long-standing gap between language learning and reinforcement learning phenomena.