SEAD: Unsupervised ensemble of streaming anomaly detectors
Published in International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2025., 2025
Saumya Shah, Abishek Sankararaman, Murali Narayanaswamy, Vikramank Singh
Can we efficiently choose the best Anomaly Detection (AD) algorithm for a data-stream without requiring anomaly labels? Streaming anomaly detection is hard. SOTA AD algorithms are sensitive to their hyper-parameters and no single method works well on all datasets. The best algorithm/hyper-parameter combination for a given data-stream can change over time with data drift. ‘What is an anomaly?’ is often application, context and dataset dependent. We propose SEAD (Streaming Ensemble of Anomaly Detectors), the first model selection algorithm for streaming, unsupervised AD. All prior AD model selection algorithms are either supervised, or only work in the offline setting when all data from the test set is available upfront. We show that SEAD is (i) unsupervised, i.e., requires no true anomaly labels, (ii) efficiently implementable in a streaming setting, (iii) agnostic to the choice of the base algorithms among which it chooses from, and (iv) adaptive to non-stationarity in the data-stream. Experiments on 14 non-trivial public datasets and an internal dataset corroborate our claims.