Classification-Based Anomaly Detection for General Data

Anomaly detection, finding patterns that substantially deviate from those seen previously, is one of the fundamental problems of artificial intelligence. Recently, classification-based methods were shown to achieve superior results on this task. In this work, we present a unifying view and propose an open-set method, GOAD, to relax current generalization assumptions. Furthermore, we extend the applicability of transformation-based methods to non-image data using random affine transformations. Our method is shown to obtain state-of-the-art accuracy and is applicable to broad data types. The strong performance of our method is extensively validated on multiple datasets from different domains. Detecting anomalies in perceived data is a key ability for humans and for artificial intelligence. Humans often detect anomalies to give early indications of danger or to discover unique opportunities. Anomaly detection systems are being used by artificial intelligence to discover credit card fraud, for detecting cyber intrusion, alert predictive maintenance of industrial equipment and for discovering attractive stock market opportunities. The typical anomaly detection setting is a one class classification task, where the objective is to classify data as normal or anomalous. The importance of the task stems from being able to raise an alarm when detecting a different pattern from those seen in the past, therefore triggering further inspection.