Latent Anomaly Detection Through Density Matrices

Abstract: This paper introduces a novel anomaly detection framework that combines the robust statistical principles of density-estimation-based anomaly detection methods with the representation-learning capabilities of deep learning models. The method originated from this framework is presented in two different versions: a shallow approach employing a density-estimation model based on adaptive Fourier features and density matrices, and a deep approach that integrates an autoencoder to learn a low-dimensional representation of the data. By estimating the density of new samples, both methods are able to find normality scores. The methods can be seamlessly integrated into an end-to-end architecture and optimized using gradient-based optimization techniques. To evaluate their performance, extensive experiments were conducted on various benchmark datasets. The results demonstrate that both versions of the method can achieve comparable or superior performance when compared to other state-of-the-art methods. Notably, the shallow approach performs better on datasets with fewer dimensions, while the autoencoder-based approach shows improved performance on datasets with higher dimensions.