A tutorial on the EM algorithm for Bayesian networks: Application to self-diagnosis of GPON-FTTH networks

Network behavior modelling is a central issue for model-based approaches of self-diagnosis of telecommunication networks. There are two methods to build such models. The model can be built from expert knowledge acquired from network standards and/or the model can be learnt from data generated by network components by data mining algorithms. In a recent work, we proposed a model of architecture and fault propagation for the GPON-FTTH (Gigabit Passive Optical Network-Fiber To The Home) access network. This model is based on a Bayesian network which encodes expert knowledge. This includes dependencies that encode fault propagation and conditional probability distributions that encode the strength of those dependencies. In this paper we consider the problem of automatically tuning the above mentioned probability distributions. This is a parameter estimation problem under missing data conditions that we solve with the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. Conditional probability distributions are learnt from the tremendous amount of alarms generated by an operating GPON-FTTH network during two months in 2015. Self-diagnosis is carried out to analyze the root cause of alarms. The performance of the diagnosis is evaluated with respect to an expert system based on deterministic decision rules currently used by the Internet Access Provider to diagnose network problems.