Sequential outlier detection based on incremental decision trees
Date
2019Source Title
IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing
Print ISSN
1053-587X
Electronic ISSN
1941-0476
Publisher
IEEE
Volume
67
Issue
4
Pages
993 - 1005
Language
English
Type
ArticleItem Usage Stats
138
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180
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Abstract
We introduce an online outlier detection algorithm to detect outliers in a sequentially observed data stream. For this purpose, we use a two-stage filtering and hedging approach. In the first stage, we construct a multimodal probability density function to model the normal samples. In the second stage, given a new observation, we label it as an anomaly if the value of aforementioned density function is below a specified threshold at the newly observed point. In order to construct our multimodal density function, we use an incremental decision tree to construct a set of subspaces of the observation space. We train a single component density function of the exponential family using the observations, which fall inside each subspace represented on the tree. These single component density functions are then adaptively combined to produce our multimodal density function, which is shown to achieve the performance of the best convex combination of the density functions defined on the subspaces. As we observe more samples, our tree grows and produces more subspaces. As a result, our modeling power increases in time, while mitigating overfitting issues. In order to choose our threshold level to label the observations, we use an adaptive thresholding scheme. We show that our adaptive threshold level achieves the performance of the optimal prefixed threshold level, which knows the observation labels in hindsight. Our algorithm provides significant performance improvements over the state of the art in our wide set of experiments involving both synthetic as well as real data.