Anomaly Detection over Streaming Data: Indy500 Case Study

Sports racing is attracting billions of audiences each year. It is powered and transformed by the latest data analysis technologies, from race car design, driving skill improvements to audience engagement on social media. However, most of the data processing are off-line and retrospective analysis. The emerging real-time data analysis from the Internet of Things (IoT) result in fast data streams generated from distributed sensors. Applying advanced Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence over such data streams to discover new information, predict future insights and make control decision is a crucial process. In this paper, we start by articulating racing car big data characteristics and present time-critical anomaly detection of the racing cars with the real-time sensors of cars and the tracks from actual racing events. We build a scalable system infrastructure based on neuro-morphic Hierarchical Temporal Memory Algorithm (HTM) algorithm and Storm stream processing engine. By courtesy of historical Indy500 racing logs, evaluation experiments on this prototype system demonstrate good performance in terms of anomaly detection accuracy and service level objective (SLO) of latency for a real-world streaming application.