Understanding and Mitigating Data Contamination in Deep Anomaly Detection: A Kernel-based Approach

Understanding and Mitigating Data Contamination in Deep Anomaly Detection: A Kernel-based Approach

Shuang Wu, Jingyu Zhao, Guangjian Tian

Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 2319-2325. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/322

Deep anomaly detection has become popular for its capability of handling complex data. However, training a deep detector is fragile to data contamination due to overfitting. In this work, we study the performance of the anomaly detectors under data contamination and construct a data-efficient countermeasure against data contamination. We show that training a deep anomaly detector induces an implicit kernel machine. We then derive an information-theoretic bound of performance degradation with respect to the data contamination ratio. To mitigate the degradation, we propose a contradicting training approach. Apart from learning normality on the contaminated dataset, our approach discourages learning an additional small auxiliary dataset of labeled anomalies. Our approach is much more affordable than constructing a completely clean training dataset. Experiments on public datasets show that our approach significantly improves anomaly detection in the presence of contamination and outperforms some recently proposed detectors.
Keywords:
Data Mining: Anomaly/Outlier Detection
Machine Learning: Kernel Methods