A sketch-based change detection technique is introduced for anomaly
detection. The technique is capable of detecting significant changes in
massive data streams with a large number of network time series. As part
of the technique, we designed a variant of the sketch data structure,
called k-ary sketch, uses a constant, small amount of memory, and has
constant per-record update and reconstruction cost. A variety of time
series forecast models are implemented on top of such summaries and
detect significant changes by looking for flows with large forecast
errors. Heuristics for automatically configuring the forecast model
parameters are presented. Real Internet traffic data is used to
demonstrate and validate the effectiveness of sketch-based change
detection method for utilization as a building block for network anomaly
detection and traffic measurement in large computer networks.