Sequential Adversarial Anomaly Detection for One-Class Event Data

We consider the sequential anomaly detection problem in the one-class setting when only the anomalous sequences are available and propose an adversarial sequential detector by solving a minimax problem to find an optimal detector against the worst-case sequences from a generator. The generator captures the dependence in sequential events using the marked point process model. The detector sequentially evaluates the likelihood of a test sequence and compares it with a time-varying threshold, also learned from data through the minimax problem. We demonstrate our proposed method’s good performance using numerical experiments on simulations and proprietary large-scale credit card fraud data sets. The proposed method can generally apply to detecting anomalous sequences.

History: W. Nick Street served as the senior editor for this article.

Funding: This work is partially supported by the National Science Foundation [Grants CAREER CCF-1650913, DMS-1938106, and DMS-1830210] and grant support from Macy’s Technology.

Data Ethics & Reproducibility Note: The code capsule is available on Code Ocean at https://doi.org/10.24433/CO.2329910.v1 and in the e-Companion to this article (available at https://doi.org/10.1287/ijds.2023.0026).