Unknown unknowns

When Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defense, had a news briefing on February 12, 2002, about the lack of evidence linking the government of Iraq to the supply of weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups, it immediately became a subject of much commentary. Rumsfeld stated the following (DoD News, 2012):

"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns-the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones."

This statement might seem confusing at first, but the idea of unknown unknowns was well studied among scholars dealing with risk, NSA, and other intelligence agencies. What the statement basically implies is the following:

Known knowns: These are well-known problems or issues; we know how to recognize them and how deal with them
Known unknowns: These are expected or foreseeable problems, which can be reasonably anticipated, but have not occurred before
Unknown unknowns: These are unexpected and unforeseeable problems, which pose significant risk, as they cannot be anticipated, based on previous experience

In the following sections, we will look into two fundamental approaches dealing with the first two types of knowns and unknowns: suspicious pattern detection dealing with known knowns, and anomalous pattern detection targeting known unknowns.

Table of Contents for Unknown unknowns

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Table of Contents for
Unknown unknowns