Latent Laplacian Maximum Entropy Discrimination for Detection of High-Utility Anomalies

Elizabeth Hou, Kumar Sricharan, Alfred O. Hero III

Abstract: Data-driven anomaly detection methods suffer from the drawback of detecting all instances that are statistically rare, irrespective of whether the detected instances have real-world significance or not. In this paper, we are interested in the problem of specifically detecting anomalous instances that are known to have high real-world utility, while ignoring the low-utility statistically anomalous instances. To this end, we propose a novel method called Latent Laplacian Maximum Entropy Discrimination (LatLapMED) as a potential solution. This method uses the Entropy Minimization (EM) algorithm to simultaneously incorporate the Geometric EM principle for identifying statistical anomalies, and the MED principle to incorporate utility labels, in order to detect high-utility anomalies. We apply our method in both simulated and real datasets to demonstrate that it has superior performance over existing alternatives that independently pre-process with unsupervised anomaly detection algorithms before classifying.