Extreme value theory for anomaly detection – the GPD classifier

Classification tasks usually assume that all possible classes are present during the training phase. This is restrictive if the algorithm is used over a long time and possibly encounters samples from unknown new classes. It is therefore fundamental to develop algorithms able to distinguish between normal and abnormal test data. In the last few years, extreme value theory has become an important tool in multivariate statistics and machine learning. The recently introduced extreme value machine, a classifier motivated by extreme value theory, addresses this problem and achieves competitive performance in specific cases. We show that this algorithm has some theoretical and practical drawbacks and can fail even if the recognition task is fairly simple. To overcome these limitations, we propose two new algorithms for anomaly detection relying on approximations from extreme value theory that are more robust in such cases. We exploit the intuition that test points that are extremely far from the training classes are more likely to be abnormal objects. We derive asymptotic results motivated by univariate extreme value theory that make this intuition precise. We show the effectiveness of our classifiers in simulations and on real data sets.