On-line anomaly detection and resilience in classifier ensembles

Detection of anomalies is a broad field of study, which is applied in different areas such as data monitoring, navigation, and pattern recognition. In this paper we propose two measures to detect anomalous behaviors in an ensemble of classifiers by monitoring their decisions; one based on Mahalanobis distance and another based on information theory. These approaches are useful when an ensemble of classifiers is used and a decision is made by ordinary classifier fusion methods, while each classifier is devoted to monitor part of the environment. Upon detection of anomalous classifiers we propose a strategy that attempts to minimize adverse effects of faulty classifiers by excluding them from the ensemble. We applied this method to an artificial dataset and sensor-based human activity datasets, with different sensor configurations and two types of noise (additive and rotational on inertial sensors). We compared our method with two other well-known approaches, generalized likelihood ratio (GLR) and One-Class Support Vector Machine (OCSVM), which detect anomalies at data/feature level. We found that our method is comparable with GLR and OCSVM. The advantages of our method compared to them is that it avoids monitoring raw data or features and only takes into account the decisions that are made by their classifiers, therefore it is independent of sensor modality and nature of anomaly. On the other hand, we found that OCSVM is very sensitive to the chosen parameters and furthermore in different types of anomalies it may react differently. In this paper we discuss the application domains which benefit from our method.