NetSE Small: Unsupervised flow-based clustering

大型企业和运营商的运营商需要了解其网络处理的流量类型，以及紧急应用和流量行为，以便更好地为他们提供服务并检测异常。此外，更好地评估所承载的流量将为网络规划和安全提供信息。特别是对于私有企业网络，可以使用监控方法来检测指示非专业(或至少是未经授权)活动的不适当流量类别。这项工作将采用和创新无监督机器学习的方法来对流量进行分类，以确定企业网络中活跃的最终用户应用程序的类型。该项目的更广泛影响将包括向更广泛的机器学习研究人员解释网络概念，反之亦然，以便新开发的技术将广泛传播到网络界以及科学和工程的其他领域。此外，还将开发和传播关于机器学习在网络流量数据和相关概念中的应用的跨学科研究生级别的课程。通过与行业合作伙伴的合作，将实现更多务实的发展。最后，该项目将致力于支持来自计算机科学和工程专业中代表性不足群体的研究生，特别是女性。由于计算和通信资源有限，将要进行的研究的主要技术价值将与正在考虑的大量和相当复杂的网络数据有关，包括普遍存在的短流。

Operators of large-scale enterprises and ISPs need to understand the type of traffic that their networks handle, and emergent applications and traffic behavior, in order to better service them and detect anomalies. Also, better assessment of the carried traffic will inform network planning and security. Particularly for private enterprise networks, monitoring methods can be used to detect inappropriate traffic classes indicating unprofessional (or at least unauthorized) activity. This work will adapt and innovate methods of unsupervised machine learning to classify traffic flows to ascertain the types of end-user applications which are active in an enterprise network. The broader impact of the project will include explaining networking concepts to a wider audience of machine learning researchers, and vice versa so that the newly developed techniques will have wide dissemination to the networking community, as well as to other domains in science and engineering. Also, cross-disciplinary graduate-level courseware on applications of machine learning to network flow data and related concepts will be developed and disseminated. More practical developments will be achieved through collaboration with industrial partners. Finally, the project will aim to support graduate students from under-represented groups in computer science and engineering, particularly women.The primary technical merit of the research to be conducted will pertain to the high-volume and considerably complex network data under consideration, including prevalent short flows, given limited computing and communication resources to do so.