The reduction of aviation safety metrics below target thresholds continue to drive down the number of aviation fatalities and accidents. To meet future safety demands, sustained efforts by aviation agencies promoting safety assurance processes and systems have prompted ongoing research on identifying and mitigating in-flight risks. With the projected increase in passenger load factor and rollout of more autonomous systems into the national airspace, the need to detect high-risk events in-time or ahead-of-time is becoming increasingly crucial. New anomaly detection and precursor identification algorithms will need to scale to different airframes, levels of autonomy, and system complexity. While the pervasiveness of deep learning has resulted in the development of performant anomaly detection methods, these sophisticated models currently suffer from low end-user interpretability. Building off our previous work on identifying adverse events in multivariate flight data during descent, we propose a data-driven approach for detecting in-flight adverse events caused by the complex interplay of flight variables. Our approach utilizes ordinal patterns of important aircraft stability variables (e.g., airspeed and descent rate) to capture multivariate flight dynamics that can be used to predict the onset of unstable approaches, a high-risk adverse event that can occur during approach. Through the use of ordinal patterns, we aim to create more interpretable detection models of in-flight adverse events that can be translated to future autonomous systems without difficulty. Our analysis shows the presence of distinct ordinal pattern distributions that can be used to predict unstable approaches 1 minute ahead of time with an accuracy of 0.69 and a recall of 0.73 and 30 seconds ahead with an accuracy of 0.70 and a recall of 0.86.

Risk detection↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Understanding the Impact of Unobservable Variables on the Performance of Predictive Models: The Need for Feature Space Partitioning and Fusion

When developing predictive models over a dataset, the model is globally optimized across the entire feature space to learn a decision boundary. However, when unobservable variables—which cannot be measured or estimated—interact with the observable variables, this can negatively impact the optimization applied to the decision boundary since the data samples introduced by unobservable variables may have little to no association with the applied global optimization. This, consequently, penalizes the entire decision boundary and model performance. This paper examines some of the detrimental effects of unobservable variables, particularly their role in creating new modes in the distribution of observable variables and reducing the separability of class distributions. Such challenges result in skewed or warped decision boundaries and decreased accuracy of model predictions, particularly for interpretable models like logistic regression and decision trees. Through two illustrative case examples, we highlight the need to address the challenges imposed by unobservable variables. We propose a strategy to mitigate these challenges by creating local regions within the feature space through partitioning. This enables the optimization of local models within the regions to overcome the impact of unobservability in different feature space localities. Research into a more sophisticated partitioning strategy and where the partition should be relative to the sample of interest is left as future work. Through the analysis of the impact of unobservability and the development of a partitioning method, we demonstrate the clear need for a partitioning strategy that integrates knowledge from multiple local models to estimate risk factors using information fusion. Thus, we establish the foundation and motivation for using partitioning and information fusion to overcome the effects of unobservability in predictive models. Formal fusion methods, such as Dempster-Shafer theory, can better leverage the information from local regions to improve the performance of interpretable predictive models in the presence of unobservable variables.

Time Series Data↗