We introduce an algorithmic method for population anomaly detection based on gaussianization through an adversarial autoencoder. This method is applicable to detection of soft' anomalies in arbitrarily distributed highly-dimensional data. A soft, or population, anomaly is characterized by a shift in the distribution of the data set, where certain elements appear with higher probability than anticipated. Such anomalies must be detected by considering a sufficiently large sample set rather than a single sample. Applications include, but not limited to, payment fraud trends, data exfiltration, disease clusters and epidemics, and social unrests. We evaluate the method on several domains and obtain both quantitative results and qualitative insights.
Population anomaly detection and divergence estimation is explored in @cite_6 @cite_5 . @cite_3 apply population (group) anomaly detection to social media analysis.
@cite_5 @cite_3 @cite_6
2015172091 2041390734 2014211872 2583348919
Traditional anomaly detection on social media mostly focuses on individual point anomalies while anomalous phenomena usually occur in groups. Therefore, it is valuable to study the collective behavior of individuals and detect group anomalies. Existing group anomaly detection approaches rely on the assumption that the groups are known, which can hardly be true in real world social media applications. In this article, we take a generative approach by proposing a hierarchical Bayes model: Group Latent Anomaly Detection (GLAD) model. GLAD takes both pairwise and point-wise data as input, automatically infers the groups and detects group anomalies simultaneously. To account for the dynamic properties of the social media data, we further generalize GLAD to its dynamic extension d-GLAD. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate our models on both synthetic and real world datasets. The empirical results demonstrate that our approach is effective and robust in discovering latent groups and detecting group anomalies. A novel method for crowd flow modeling and anomaly detection is proposed for both coherent and incoherent scenes. The novelty is revealed in three aspects. First, it is a unique utilization of particle trajectories for modeling crowded scenes, in which we propose new and efficient representative trajectories for modeling arbitrarily complicated crowd flows. Second, chaotic dynamics are introduced into the crowd context to characterize complicated crowd motions by regulating a set of chaotic invariant features, which are reliably computed and used for detecting anomalies. Third, a probabilistic framework for anomaly detection and localization is formulated. The overall work-flow begins with particle advection based on optical flow. Then particle trajectories are clustered to obtain representative trajectories for a crowd flow. Next, the chaotic dynamics of all representative trajectories are extracted and quantified using chaotic invariants known as maximal Lyapunov exponent and correlation dimension. Probabilistic model is learned from these chaotic feature set, and finally, a maximum likelihood estimation criterion is adopted to identify a query video of a scene as normal or abnormal. Furthermore, an effective anomaly localization algorithm is designed to locate the position and size of an anomaly. Experiments are conducted on known crowd data set, and results show that our method achieves higher accuracy in anomaly detection and can effectively localize anomalies. Anomaly detection (a.k.a., outlier or burst detection) is a well-motivated problem and a major data mining and knowledge discovery task. In this article, we study the problem of population anomaly detection, one of the key issues related to event monitoring and population management within a city. Through studying detected population anomalies, we can trace and analyze these anomalies, which could help to model city traffic design and event impact analysis and prediction. Although a significant and interesting issue, it is very hard to detect population anomalies and retrieve anomaly trajectories, especially given that it is difficult to get actual and sufficient population data. To address the difficulties of a lack of real population data, we take advantage of mobile phone networks, which offer enormous spatial and temporal communication data on persons. More importantly, we claim that we can utilize these mobile phone data to infer and approximate population data. Thus, we can study the population anomaly detection problem by taking advantages of unique features hidden in mobile phone data. In this article, we present a system to conduct Population Anomaly Detection (PAD). First, we propose an effective clustering method, correlation-based clustering, to cluster the incomplete location information from mobile phone data (i.e., from mobile call volume distribution to population density distribution). Then, we design an adaptive parameter-free detection method, R-scan, to capture the distributed dynamic anomalies. Finally, we devise an efficient algorithm, BT-miner, to retrieve anomaly trajectories. The experimental results from real-life mobile phone data confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithms. Finally, the proposed methods are realized as a pilot system in a city in China. Recently community detection has attracted much interest in social media to understand the collective behaviours of users and allow individuals to be modeled in the context of the group. Most existing approaches for community detection exploit either users' social links or their published content, aiming at discovering groups of densely connected or highly similar users. They often fail to find effective communities due to excessive noise in content, sparsity in links, and heterogenous behaviours of users in social media. Further, they are unable to provide insights and rationales behind the formation of the group and the collective behaviours of the users. To tackle these challenges, we propose to discover communities in a low- dimensional latent space in which we simultaneously learn the representation of users and communities. In particular, we integrated different social views of the network into a low-dimensional latent space in which we sought dense clusters of users as communities. By imposing a Laplacian regularizer into affiliation matrix, we further incorporated prior knowledge into the community discovery process. Finally community profiles were computed by a linear operator integrating the profiles of members. Taking the wellness domain as an example, we conducted experiments on a large scale real world dataset of users tweeting about diabetes and its related concepts, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in discovering and profiling user communities.