© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other worksIn this paper, we explore the benefits of analysing the optical spectrum of lightpaths for soft-failure detection and identification in Spectrum Switched Optical Network. We present a framework exploiting machine learning (ML) based algorithms that uses descriptive models of the optical spectrum of a lightpath in different points along its route to detect whether the...