Publications

Anomaly Detection : A Survey
Varun Chandola, Arindam Banerjee, Vipin Kumar
University of Minnesota
To appear in - ACM Computing Surveys

A modified version available as a technical report: Anomaly Detection : A Survey (PDF).

Anomaly detection is an important problem that has been researched within diverse research areas and application domains. Many anomaly detection techniques have been specifically developed for certain application domains, while others are more generic. This survey tries to provide a structured and comprehensive overview of the research on anomaly detection. We have grouped existing techniques into different categories based on the underlying approach adopted by each technique. For each category we have identified key assumptions, which are used by the techniques to differentiate between normal and anomalous behavior. When applying a given technique to a particular domain, these assumptions can be used as guidelines to assess the effectiveness of the technique in that domain.

We hope that this survey will provide a better understanding of the different directions in which research has been done on this topic, and how techniques developed in one area can be applied in domains for which they were not intended to begin with.