Anomaly Detection

I just read a paper entitled "Outside the Closed World: On Using Machine Learning For Network Intrusion Detection," which was very interesting because of the other paper we recently read for class on Anomaly Detection. I understood this paper really well because instead of trying to introduce a new model for anomaly detection, it simply tried to explain two things: (i) why machine-learning hasn't been as effective in anomaly detection as it has been in other areas, e.g. natural language processing and product recommendation systems, and (ii) how researchers can approach this area successfully.

I haven't read too many papers like this, but there must be plenty who try and steer research in the right direction. Some of the authors insights were intuitive, while others seemed fairly obvious. Overall, it helped me understand a little more how research is approached as opposed to how it should be approached. As for my own research, I am focusing on wireless networks, but I still have yet to decide what topic to choose for my proposal. I guess I will have to pick soon.