Adaptive Isolation Forest

Jia Justin Liu, Guilherme Weigert Cassales, Fei Tony Liu, Bernhard Pfahringer, Albert Bifet

Published: 01 Jan 2025, Last Modified: 10 Apr 2026CrossrefEveryoneRevisionsCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: Anomaly detection in real-world data streams often struggles with concept drift, where evolving data distributions challenge algorithms to maintain a balance between accuracy, speed, stability, and plasticity. We present Adaptive Isolation Forest (AIF), a novel anomaly detection algorithm designed to effectively adapt to such changes in a resource-efficient and balanced manner. AIF’s novelty can be found in the combination of a smart model update mechanism together with a newly developed MinTreeMaxMass (MTMM) criterion, which scores individual trees for replacement. Extensive evaluations on various benchmark datasets demonstrate that AIF significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art streaming anomaly detection algorithms in terms of detection accuracy. Moreover, AIF achieves linear time and space complexities, providing a robust solution that maintains high accuracy and efficiency, balancing stability and plasticity in dynamic data streams.
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