Generative-Adversarial Class-Imbalance Learning for Classifying Cyber-Attacks and Faults - A Cyber-Physical Power System

There has been an increasing interest in the use of data-driven techniques for classifying cyber-attacks and physical faults in cyber-physical systems. In real-world applications, the number of cyber-attack and faulty samples is usually far less than normal samples. This causes the skewed class distribution in data collected from cyber-physical systems. Training an accurate predictive model under skewed class conditions is not an easy task. In this work, we introduce a new generative adversarial framework for learning from skewed class distributions. This novel Adversarial Class-Imbalance Learning (ACIL) scheme has a novel loss function that is used during the adversarial training session. ACIL tries to iteratively adjust weights of an auxiliary multilayer perceptron to learn the minority class (i.e., cyber-attacks and physical faults) distributions along with the majority class (i.e., normal) distribution. Moreover, we devise an inclusive data-driven scheme for classifying cyber-attacks and faults, which includes four experiments of a baseline, nine state-of-the-art class-imbalance learning methods, two different generative-adversarial network-based approaches, and ACIL. These techniques are verified and compared through several experimental cyber-physical power scenarios. The obtained results show the effectiveness of ACIL for classifying samples of cyber-attacks and faults with skewed class distributions.