An anomaly prediction framework for financial IT systems using hybrid machine learning methods

In financial field, a robust software system is of vital importance to ensure the smooth operation of financial transactions. However, many financial corporations still depend on operators to identify and eliminate the system failures when financial software systems break down. This traditional operation method is time consuming and extremely inefficient. To improve the efficiency and accuracy of system failure detection and thereby reduce the impact of system failures on financial services, we propose a novel machine learning-based framework to predict the occurrence of system exceptions and failures in a financial software system. In particular, we first extract rich information from system logs and eliminate noises in the data. Then the cleaned data is leveraged as the input of our proposed anomaly prediction framework which consists of three modules: key performance indicator(KPI) data prediction module, anomaly identification module and severity classification module. Notably, we design a hierarchical architecture of alarm classifiers and try to alleviate the influence of class-imbalance problem on the overall performance. Empirically, the experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method on a real-world financial software system log data set.