Road accidents have a high societal cost that could be reduced through improved risk predictions using machine learning. This study investigates whether telemetric data collected on long-distance trucks can be used to predict the risk of accidents associated with a driver. We use a dataset provided by a truck transportation company containing the driving data of 1,141 drivers for 18 months. We evaluate two different machine learning approaches to perform this task. In the first approach, features are extracted from the time series data using the FRESH algorithm and then used to estimate the risk using Random Forests. In the second approach, we use a convolutional neural network to directly estimate the risk from the time series data. We find that neither approach is able to successfully estimate the risk of accidents on this dataset, in spite of many methodological attempts. We discuss the difficulties of using telemetric data for the estimation of the risk of accidents that could explain this negative result.

Information systems such as cellular networks produce large volumes of data, making the characterization of network faults a difficult task. In this work, we introduce a new fault analysis framework based on association rule mining and validate it to identify the root cause of faults in information systems. The paper describes a strategy using association rules to specifically target faults while improving runtime performance relative to the standard Apache Spark implementation. We also introduce a novel association rule filtering strategy called Cover Set filtering that prunes and merges rule sets to produce high-quality, concise and interpretable results. The proposed framework is evaluated with real-world telecommunication datasets. Comparing this framework approach with other strategies, we demonstrate a better rule diversity in general and a sufficiently compact analysis of the faults. The validation of our experimental results was conducted by telecommunications experts, who confirmed the clarity and value of the results for a quantitative assessment of cellular network failures.

Road accidents are an important issue of our modern societies, responsible for millions of deaths and injuries every year in the world. In Quebec only, in 2018, road accidents are responsible for 359 deaths and 33 thousands of injuries. In this paper, we show how one can leverage open datasets of a city like Montreal, Canada, to create high-resolution accident prediction models, using big data analytics. Compared to other studies in road accident prediction, we have a much higher prediction resolution, i.e., our models predict the occurrence of an accident within an hour, on road segments defined by intersections. Such models could be used in the context of road accident prevention, but also to identify key factors that can lead to a road accident, and consequently, help elaborate new policies. We tested various machine learning methods to deal with the severe class imbalance inherent to accident prediction problems. In particular, we implemented the Balanced Random Forest algorithm, a variant of the Random Forest machine learning algorithm in Apache Spark. Interestingly, we found that in our case, Balanced Random Forest does not perform significantly better than Random Forest. Experimental results show that 85% of road vehicle collisions are detected by our model with a false positive rate of 13%. The examples identified as positive are likely to correspond to high risk situations. In addition, we identify the most important predictors of vehicle collisions for the area of Montreal: the count of accidents on the same road segment during previous years, the temperature, the day of the year, the hour and the visibility.

We aim to predict and explain service failures in supply-chain networks, more precisely among last-mile pickup and delivery services to customers. We analyze a dataset of 500,000 services using (1) supervised classification with Random Forests, and (2) Association Rules. Our classifier reaches an average sensitivity of 0.7 and an average specificity of 0.7 for the 5 studied types of failure. Association Rules reassert the importance of confirmation calls to prevent failures due to customers not at home, show the importance of the time window size, slack time, and geographical location of the customer for the other failure types, and highlight the effect of the retailer company on several failure types. To reduce the occurrence of service failures, our data models could be coupled to optimizers, or used to define counter-measures to be taken by human dispatchers.

Cloud computing services are emerging as an essential component of the industry ICT infrastructure and, consequently, one of the fastest growing business opportunities for Internet infrastructure and service providers. Many enterprises are moving their services towards cloud infrastructures. In this rapidly growing market, datacenter (DC) scalability is becoming a major technical challenge for service providers as well as its performance optimization, with a key focus on the network technologies and their control. In fact, service providers have to cope with cloud services delivered by more and more geographically distributed DCs, ever increasing requests by users and DC providers for very high throughputs and low latencies, resource dynamicity and elasticity (i.e. flexible storage and computing on demand) and seamless resource/service migration. The future Internet architecture needs to offer: