Anomaly Detection by an Ensemble of Random Pairs of Hyperspheres

Walid Durani, Collin Leiber, Khalid Durani, Claudia Plant, Christian Böhm

Keywords: ensemble, isolation, anomaly detection

Abstract: Anomaly detection is a crucial task in data mining, focusing on identifying data points that deviate significantly from the main patterns in the data. This paper introduces Anomaly Detection by an Ensemble of Random Pairs of Hyperspheres (ADERH), a new isolation-based technique leveraging two key observations: (i) anomalies are comparatively rare, and (ii) they typically deviate more strongly from general patterns than normal data points. Drawing on a delta-separation argument, ADERH constructs an ensemble of multi-scale hyperspheres built upon randomly paired data points to identify anomalies. To address inevitable overlaps between anomalous and normal regions in the feature space, ADERH integrates two complementary concepts: Pitch, which highlights points near hypersphere boundaries, and NDensity, which down-weights hyperspheres centered on sparse (and often anomalous) regions. By averaging these local, density-adjusted ``isolation'' indicators across many random subsets, ADERH yields robust anomaly scores that clearly separate normal from abnormal samples. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world datasets show that ADERH consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods while maintaining linear runtime scalability and stable performance across varying hyperparameter settings.

Primary Area: General machine learning (supervised, unsupervised, online, active, etc.)

Submission Number: 18843