How to pick the best anomaly detector?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Hein, Marie, Kasieczka, Gregor, Krämer, Michael, Moureaux, Louis, Mück, Alexander, Shih, David
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Hein, Marie
Kasieczka, Gregor
Krämer, Michael
Moureaux, Louis
Mück, Alexander
Shih, David
author_facet Hein, Marie
Kasieczka, Gregor
Krämer, Michael
Moureaux, Louis
Mück, Alexander
Shih, David
contents Anomaly detection has the potential to discover new physics in unexplored regions of the data. However, choosing the best anomaly detector for a given data set in a model-agnostic way is an important challenge which has hitherto largely been neglected. In this paper, we introduce the data-driven ARGOS metric, which has a sound theoretical foundation and is empirically shown to robustly select the most sensitive anomaly detection model given the data. Focusing on weakly-supervised, classifier-based anomaly detection methods, we show that the ARGOS metric outperforms other model selection metrics previously used in the literature, in particular the binary cross-entropy loss. We explore several realistic applications, including hyperparameter tuning as well as architecture and feature selection, and in all cases we demonstrate that ARGOS is robust to the noisy conditions of anomaly detection.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_14832
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How to pick the best anomaly detector?
Hein, Marie
Kasieczka, Gregor
Krämer, Michael
Moureaux, Louis
Mück, Alexander
Shih, David
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
Machine Learning
High Energy Physics - Experiment
Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
Anomaly detection has the potential to discover new physics in unexplored regions of the data. However, choosing the best anomaly detector for a given data set in a model-agnostic way is an important challenge which has hitherto largely been neglected. In this paper, we introduce the data-driven ARGOS metric, which has a sound theoretical foundation and is empirically shown to robustly select the most sensitive anomaly detection model given the data. Focusing on weakly-supervised, classifier-based anomaly detection methods, we show that the ARGOS metric outperforms other model selection metrics previously used in the literature, in particular the binary cross-entropy loss. We explore several realistic applications, including hyperparameter tuning as well as architecture and feature selection, and in all cases we demonstrate that ARGOS is robust to the noisy conditions of anomaly detection.
title How to pick the best anomaly detector?
topic High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
Machine Learning
High Energy Physics - Experiment
Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14832