Skip to yearly menu bar Skip to main content


Poster

PIDForest: Anomaly Detection via Partial Identification

Parikshit Gopalan · Vatsal Sharan · Udi Wieder

East Exhibition Hall B, C #60

Keywords: [ Algorithms ] [ Unsupervised Learning ] [ Algorithms -> Clustering; Algorithms -> Similarity and Distance Learning; Applications ] [ Time Series Analysis ]


Abstract:

We consider the problem of detecting anomalies in a large dataset. We propose a framework called Partial Identification which captures the intuition that anomalies are easy to distinguish from the overwhelming majority of points by relatively few attribute values. Formalizing this intuition, we propose a geometric anomaly measure for a point that we call PIDScore, which measures the minimum density of data points over all subcubes containing the point. We present PIDForest: a random forest based algorithm that finds anomalies based on this definition. We show that it performs favorably in comparison to several popular anomaly detection methods, across a broad range of benchmarks. PIDForest also provides a succinct explanation for why a point is labelled anomalous, by providing a set of features and ranges for them which are relatively uncommon in the dataset.

Live content is unavailable. Log in and register to view live content