A Novel Evaluation Metric for Unsupervised Learning in AIS-Based Maritime Anomaly Detection: MADQI

Abstract

This paper introduces a new systematic framework for detecting anomalies in maritime Automatic Identification System (AIS) datasets. These anomalies include abnormal vessel behaviours related to speed, position jumps, time gaps, and turn angles. Although unsupervised learning algorithms such as Isolation Forest are widely used for detecting anomalous vessel movements, they often lack systematic and meaningful evaluation measures. To address this limitation, we propose a novel quality metric called Maritime Anomaly Detection Quality Index (MADQI). The prosed MADQI is a composite index designed to evaluate the anomaly detection performance of machine learning models without requiring labelled data. The proposed framework uses Haversine distance calculations to analyse AIS datasets and identify anomalies based on their spatial and behavioural characteristics. The proposed MADQI evaluation framework integrates four interconnected metrics: Anomaly Rate Consistency (ARC), Physical Plausibility Score (PPS), Score Distribution Separation (SDS), and Extreme Case Evidence (ECE). These metrics are combined through automatic normalisation using multi-chunk evaluation and adaptive scaling techniques. Experimental results on the AIS dataset show that the proposed framework achieved a MADQI score of 80.37%, demonstrating its effectiveness for unsupervised anomaly detection. In particular, the algorithm performed strongly in identifying abnormal vessel behaviour. Among the individual MADQI components, ECE and ARC achieved scores of 0.907 and 1.000, respectively, indicating excellent capability in detecting extreme anomalies and maintaining anomaly rate consistency. Overall, these results are encouraging and demonstrate that the proposed framework provides a reliable and meaningful approach for evaluating unsupervised anomaly detection in maritime AIS data.