Anomaly detection is of paramount importance in many real-world domains characterized by evolving behavior, such as monitoring cyber-physical systems, human conditions and network traffic. Current research in anomaly detection leverages offline learning working with static data or online learning focusing on constant adaptation to evolving data. At the same time, lifelong learning represents an emerging trend, answering the need for machine learning models that continuously adapt to new challenges in dynamic environments while retaining past knowledge. Although this aspect could be beneficial to build effective and robust anomaly detection models, lifelong learning research is mainly dedicated to proposing new model update strategies in image classification and reinforcement learning domains. The limited scope addressed by lifelong learning works thus far creates a gap in understanding whether such techniques and capabilities can be fruitfully exploited in anomaly detection contexts, which represents the main motivation of this paper. More specifically, anomaly detection provides unique challenges such as an evolving normal class and a limited availability of anomalies, which significantly differs from the landscape and scenarios of lifelong image classification and reinforcement learning. In this paper, we face this issue by exploring, motivating, and discussing lifelong anomaly detection, as well as providing foundations with regard to scenarios, strategies, and metrics. First, we explain why lifelong anomaly detection is relevant, defining challenges and opportunities to design anomaly detection methods that deal with lifelong learning complexities. Second, we formulate and characterize lifelong learning settings tailored for anomaly detection problems, and design a scenario generation procedure that enables researchers to experiment with lifelong anomaly detection using existing datasets. Third, we perform experiments with popular anomaly detection methods on proposed lifelong scenarios, emphasizing the gap in performance that could be filled with the adoption of lifelong learning. In summary, our efforts are directed at assessing the performance of non-lifelong anomaly detection models in lifelong scenarios, and how the adoption of lifelong learning impacts their learning capabilities. Overall, we conclude that the adoption of lifelong anomaly detection is important to design more robust models that provide a comprehensive view of the environment, as well as simultaneous adaptation and knowledge retention.

In this paper we propose a novel reservation plan adaptation system based on machine learning. In the context of cloud auto-scaling, an important issue is the ability to define and use a resource reservation plan, which enables efficient resource scheduling. If necessary, the plan may allocate new resources upon reservation where a sufficient amount of resources is available. Our solution allows the updating of a reservation plan initially prepared by an administrator. It makes it possible to adapt reservation plans one or more weeks ahead. Hence, it allows time for the administrator to analyze the plan and discover potential problems with resource under-provisioning or over-provisioning, which may prevent server overload in the former case and unnecessary expenses in the latter. It also makes it possible to extract and analyze the knowledge learned, which may provide useful information about resource usage characteristics. The proposed solution is tested on OpenStack using real Wikipedia server traffic data. Experimental results demonstrate that machine learning enables an improvement in resource usage.

Since the concept of merging the capabilities of mobile devices and cloud computing is becoming increasingly popular, an important question is how to optimally schedule services/tasks between the device and the cloud. The main objective of this article is to investigate the possibilities for using machine learning on mobile devices in order to manage the execution of services within the framework of Mobile Cloud Computing. In this study, an agent-based architecture with learning possibilities is proposed to solve this problem. Two learning strategies are considered: supervised and reinforcement learning. The solution proposed leverages, among other things, knowledge about mobile device resources, network connection possibilities and device power consumption, as a result of which a decision is made with regard to the place where the task in question is to be executed. By employing machine learning techniques, the agent working on a mobile device gains experience in determining the optimal place for the execution of a given type of task. The research conducted allowed for the verification of the solution proposed in the domain of multimedia file conversion and demonstrated its usefulness in reducing the time required for task execution. Using the experience gathered as a result of subsequent series of tests, the agent became more efficient in assigning the task of multimedia file conversion to either the mobile device or cloud computing resources.

In this paper we present an original adaptive task scheduling system, which optimizes the energy consumption of mobile devices using machine learning mechanisms and context information. The system learns how to allocate resources appropriately: how to schedule services/tasks optimally between the device and the cloud, which is especially important in mobile systems. Decisions are made taking the context into account (e.g. network connection type, location, potential time and cost of executing the application or service). In this study, a supervised learning agent architecture and service selection algorithm are proposed to solve this problem. Adaptation is performed online, on a mobile device. Information about the context, task description, the decision made and its results such as power consumption are stored and constitute training data for a supervised learning algorithm, which updates the knowledge used to determine the optimal location for the execution of a given type of task. To verify the solution proposed, appropriate software has been developed and a series of experiments have been conducted. Results show that as a result of the experience gathered and the learning process performed, the decision module has become more efficient in assigning the task to either the mobile device or cloud resources.