Context discovery for anomaly detection

Ece Calikus, Slawomir Nowaczyk, Onur Dikmen

Abstract: Contextual anomaly detection aims to identify objects that are anomalous only within specific contexts, while appearing normal otherwise. However, most existing methods are limited to a single context defined by user-specified features. In practice, identifying the right context is not trivial, even for domain experts. Moreover, for high-dimensional data, the notion of meaningful contexts that can unveil anomalies becomes substantially more complex. For instance, multiple useful contexts can often capture different phenomena. In this work, we introduce Con Quest, a new unsupervised contextual anomaly detection approach that automatically discovers and incorporates multiple contexts useful for detecting and interpreting anomalies. Through experiments on 25 datasets, we show that Con Quest outperforms various state-of-the-art methods. We also demonstrate its benefits in terms of increased direct interpretability.