Analysis of railway data - Detecting outliers

Question

I would like some pointers about the following problem:

I would like to detect anomalies in a pretty huge collection of railway data. Or create a baseline model for detecting future anomalies. The data I have at my disposal exists out of coordinates and speed at the given coordinate (also the time of measurement). Could this perhaps be approached as a regression problem where there's a clear(?) connection between location and speed of a train. For instance a train suddenly moving at snail's pace on a track that from historical data is considered high velocity could be a potential anomaly. If this could indeed be approached in such a way would something like SVM be an option or should I look into other algorithms?

Answer 1

There are a number of directions you can take, and there are a number of questions related to this topic (anamoly-detection-for-transaction-data). One question to answer first is whether the data is seasonal or not.

You already suggested a valid approach. Determine which areas are correlated to low and high speeds and than determine when a speed differs. I think it's best to start with a heuristic approach and than try more complicated methods to try to improve. If you want to use an SVM, a one-class SVM may work well (one-class SVM)