Antimodes and Graphical Anomaly Exploration via Adaptive Depth Quantile Functions

Abstract: This work proposes and investigates a novel method for anomaly detection and shows it to be competitive in a variety of Euclidean and non-Euclidean situations. It is based on an extension of the depth quantile functions (DQF) approach. The DQF approach encodes geometric information about a point cloud via functions of a single variable, whereas each observation in a data set is associated with a single such function. Plotting these functions provides a very beneficial visualization aspect. This technique can be applied to any data lying in a Hilbert space. The proposed anomaly detection approach is motivated by the geometric insight of the presence of anomalies in data being tied to the existence of antimodes in the data generating distribution. Coupling this insight with novel theoretical understanding into the shape of the DQFs gives rise to the proposed adaptive DQF (aDQF) methodology. Applications to various data sets illustrate the DQF and aDQF's strong anomaly detection performance, and the benefits of its visualization aspects.