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Main Authors: Zhu, Lina, Zhou, Lin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19248
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author Zhu, Lina
Zhou, Lin
author_facet Zhu, Lina
Zhou, Lin
contents In this work, we revisit outlier hypothesis testing and propose exponentially consistent, low-complexity fixed-length tests that achieve a better tradeoff between detection performance and computational complexity than existing exhaustive-search methods. In this setting, the goal is to identify outlying sequences from a set of observed sequences, where most sequences are i.i.d. from a nominal distribution and outliers are i.i.d. from a different anomalous distribution. While prior work has primarily focused on discrete-valued sequences, we extend the results of Bu et al. (TSP 2019) to continuous-valued sequences and develop a distribution-free test based on the MMD metric. Our framework handles both known and unknown numbers of outliers. In the unknown-count case, we bound the detection performance and characterize the tradeoff among the exponential decay rates of three types of error probabilities. Finally, we quantify the performance penalty incurred when the number of outliers is unknown.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_19248
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exponentially Consistent Low-Complexity Outlier Hypothesis Testing for Continuous Sequences
Zhu, Lina
Zhou, Lin
Signal Processing
In this work, we revisit outlier hypothesis testing and propose exponentially consistent, low-complexity fixed-length tests that achieve a better tradeoff between detection performance and computational complexity than existing exhaustive-search methods. In this setting, the goal is to identify outlying sequences from a set of observed sequences, where most sequences are i.i.d. from a nominal distribution and outliers are i.i.d. from a different anomalous distribution. While prior work has primarily focused on discrete-valued sequences, we extend the results of Bu et al. (TSP 2019) to continuous-valued sequences and develop a distribution-free test based on the MMD metric. Our framework handles both known and unknown numbers of outliers. In the unknown-count case, we bound the detection performance and characterize the tradeoff among the exponential decay rates of three types of error probabilities. Finally, we quantify the performance penalty incurred when the number of outliers is unknown.
title Exponentially Consistent Low-Complexity Outlier Hypothesis Testing for Continuous Sequences
topic Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19248