Weakly-supervised anomaly detection for multimodal data distributions

Weakly-supervised anomaly detection can outperform existing unsupervised methods with the assistance of a very small number of labeled anomalies, which attracts increasing attention from researchers. However, existing weakly-supervised anomaly detection methods are limited as these methods do not factor in the multimodel nature of the real-world data distribution. To mitigate this, we propose the Weakly-supervised Variational-mixture-model-based Anomaly Detector (WVAD). WVAD excels in multimodal datasets. It consists of two components: a deep variational mixture model, and an anomaly score estimator. The deep variational mixture model captures various features of the data from different clusters, then these features are delivered to the anomaly score estimator to assess the anomaly levels. Experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate WVAD's superiority.

Joint Selective State Space Model and Detrending for Robust Time Series Anomaly Detection

Deep learning-based sequence models are extensively employed in Time Series Anomaly Detection (TSAD) tasks due to their effective sequential modeling capabilities. However, the ability of TSAD is limited by two key challenges: (i) the ability to model long-range dependency and (ii) the generalization issue in the presence of non-stationary data. To tackle these challenges, an anomaly detector that leverages the selective state space model known for its proficiency in capturing long-term dependencies across various domains is proposed. Additionally, a multi-stage detrending mechanism is introduced to mitigate the prominent trend component in non-stationary data to address the generalization issue. Extensive experiments conducted on realworld public datasets demonstrate that the proposed methods surpass all 12 compared baseline methods.

Improving Autoencoder-based Outlier Detection with Adjustable Probabilistic Reconstruction Error and Mean-shift Outlier Scoring

Autoencoders were widely used in many machine learning tasks thanks to their strong learning ability which has drawn great interest among researchers in the field of outlier detection. However, conventional autoencoder-based methods lacked considerations in two aspects. This limited their performance in outlier detection. First, the mean squared error used in conventional autoencoders ignored the judgment uncertainty of the autoencoder, which limited their representation ability. Second, autoencoders suffered from the abnormal reconstruction problem: some outliers can be unexpectedly reconstructed well, making them difficult to identify from the inliers. To mitigate the aforementioned issues, two novel methods were proposed in this paper. First, a novel loss function named Probabilistic Reconstruction Error (PRE) was constructed to factor in both reconstruction bias and judgment uncertainty. To further control the trade-off of these two factors, two weights were introduced in PRE producing Adjustable Probabilistic Reconstruction Error (APRE), which benefited the outlier detection in different applications. Second, a conceptually new outlier scoring method based on mean-shift (MSS) was proposed to reduce the false inliers caused by the autoencoder. Experiments on 32 real-world outlier detection datasets proved the effectiveness of the proposed methods. The combination of the proposed methods achieved 41% of the relative performance improvement compared to the best baseline. The MSS improved the performance of multiple autoencoder-based outlier detectors by an average of 20%. The proposed two methods have the potential to advance autoencoder's development in outlier detection. The code is available on www.OutlierNet.com for reproducibility.