2022/04/25 by Thomas Davies, Davies, Thomas
Computer Science · #Anomaly Detection Techniques and Applications #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Topological and Geometric Data Analysis
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2204.12919
openalex publication_date 2022/04/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Topological Data Analysis (TDA) gives practioners the ability to analyse the global structure of cybersecurity data. We use TDA for anomaly detection in host-based logs collected with the open-source Logging Made Easy (LME) project. We present an approach that builds a filtration of simplicial complexes directly from Windows logs, enabling analysis of their intrinsic structure using topological tools. We compare the efficacy of persistent homology and the spectrum of graph and hypergraph Laplacians as feature vectors against a standard log embedding that counts events, and find that topological and spectral embeddings of computer logs contain discriminative information for classifying anomalous logs that is complementary to standard embeddings. We end by discussing the potential for our methods to be used as part of an explainable framework for anomaly detection.