Anomaly Detection via PCA

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an online over-sampling principal component analysis (osPCA) algorithm to address this problem, and we aim at detecting the presence of outliers from a large amount of data via an online updating technique. Unlike prior PCA based approaches, we do not store the entire data matrix or covariance matrix, and thus our approach is especially of interest in online or large-scale problems. By over-sampling the target instance and extracting the principal direction of the data, the proposed osPCA allows us to determine the anomaly of the target instance according to the variation of the resulting dominant eigenvector. Since our osPCA need not perform eigen analysis explicitly, the proposed framework is favored for online applications which have computation or memory limitations. Compared with the well-known power method for PCA and other popular anomaly detection algorithms, our experimental results verify the feasibility of our proposed method in terms of both accuracy and efficiency.
Keywords: Clustering; Anomaly detection; multivariate outlier detection; mixture model; EM; visualization; explanation; Mine Set