Detection of suspicious behavior from a sparse set of multiagent interactions

In many multiagent domains, no single observation event is sufficient to determine that the behavior of individuals is suspicious. Instead, suspiciousness must be inferred from a combination of multiple events, where events refer to the individual's interactions with other individuals. Hence, a detection system must employ a detector that combines evidence from multiple events, in contrast to most previous work, which focuses on the detection of a single, clearly suspicious event. This paper proposes a two-step detection system, where it first detects trigger events from multiagent interactions, and then combines the evidence to provide a degree of suspicion. The paper provides three key contributions: (i) proposes a novel detector that generalizes a utility-based plan recognition with arbitrary utility functions, (ii) specifies conditions that any reasonable detector should satisfy, and (iii) analyzes three detectors and compares them with the proposed approach. The results on a simulated airport domain and a dangerous-driver domain show that our new algorithm outperforms other approaches in several settings. Copyright © 2012, International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (www.ifaamas.org). All rights reserved.