Uncertainty-aware Evaluation of Auxiliary Anomalies with the Expected Anomaly Posterior

TMLR Paper3630 Authors

05 Nov 2024 (modified: 11 Nov 2024)Under review for TMLREveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Abstract: Anomaly detection is the task of identifying examples that do not behave as expected. Because anomalies are rare and unexpected events, collecting real anomalous examples is often challenging in several applications. In addition, learning an anomaly detector with limited (or no) anomalies often yields poor prediction performance. One option is to employ auxiliary synthetic anomalies to improve the model training. However, synthetic anomalies may be of poor quality: anomalies that are unrealistic or indistinguishable from normal samples may deteriorate the detector's performance. Unfortunately, no existing methods quantify the quality of auxiliary anomalies. We fill in this gap and propose the expected anomaly posterior (EAP), an uncertainty-based score function that measures the quality of auxiliary anomalies by quantifying the total uncertainty of an anomaly detector. Experimentally on 40 benchmark datasets of images and tabular data, we show that EAP outperforms 12 adapted data quality estimators in the majority of cases.
Submission Length: Regular submission (no more than 12 pages of main content)
Assigned Action Editor: ~Philip_K._Chan1
Submission Number: 3630
Loading