Estimating p-Values for Deviation Detection

Deviation detection is important for self-monitoring systems. To perform deviation detection well requires methods that, given only "normal" data from a distribution of unknown parametric form, can produce a reliable statistic for rejecting the null hypothesis, i.e. evidence for devating data. One measure of the strength of this evidence based on the data is the p-value, but few deviation detection methods utilize p-value estimation. We compare three methods that can be used to produce p-values: one class support vector machine (OCSVM), conformal anomaly detection (CAD), and a simple "most central pattern" (MCP) algorithm. The SVM and the CAD method should be able to handle a distribution of any shape. The methods are evaluated on synthetic data sets to test and illustrate their strengths and weaknesses, and on data from a real life self-monitoring scenario with a city bus fleet in normal traffic. The OCSVM has a Gaussian kernel for the synthetic data and a Hellinger kernel for the empirical data. The MCP method uses the Mahalanobis metric for the synthetic data and the Hellinger metric for the empirical data. The CAD uses the same metrics as the MCP method and has a k-nearest neighbour (kNN) non-conformity measure for both sets. The conclusion is that all three methods give reasonable, and quite similar, results on the real life data set but that they have clear strengths and weaknesses on the synthetic data sets. The MCP algorithm is quick and accurate when the "normal" data distribution is unimodal and symmetric (with the chosen metric) but not otherwise. The OCSVM is a bit cumbersome to use to create (quantized) p-values but is accurate and reliable when the data distribution is multimodal and asymmetric. The CAD is also accurate for multimodal and asymmetric distributions. The experiment on the vehicle data illustrate how algorithms like these can be used in a self-monitoring system that uses a fleet of vehicles to conduct deviation detection without supervision and without prior knowledge about what is being monitored.