Anomaly Detection: Algorithms, Explanations, Applications

  • Thomas Dietterich | Oregon State University

Anomaly detection is important for data cleaning, cybersecurity, and robust AI systems. This talk will review recent work in our group on (a) benchmarking existing algorithms, (b) developing a theoretical understanding of their behavior, (c) explaining anomaly “alarms” to a data analyst, and (d) interactively re-ranking candidate anomalies in response to analyst feedback. Then the talk will describe two applications: (a) detecting and diagnosing sensor failures in weather networks and (b) open category detection in supervised learning.

Speaker Details

Dr. Dietterich’s currently pursues interdisciplinary research at the boundary of computer science, ecology, and sustainability policy. He is part of the leadership team for OSU’s Ecosystem Informatics programs including the NSF Summer Institute in Ecoinformatics.

Dr. Dietterich (AB Oberlin College 1977; MS University of Illinois 1979; PhD Stanford University 1984) is Distinguished Professor and Director of Intelligent Systems in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University, where he joined the faculty in 1985. In 1987, he was named a Presidential Young Investigator for the NSF. In 1990, he published, with Dr. Jude Shavlik, the book entitled Readings in Machine Learning, and he also served as the Technical Program Co-Chair of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-90). From 1992-1998 he held the position of Executive Editor of the journal Machine Learning. The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence named him a Fellow in 1994, and the Association for Computing Machinery did the same in 2003. In 2000, he co-founded a free electronic journal: The Journal of Machine Learning Research, and he is currently a member of the Editorial Board. Since 2007, he has served as arXiv moderator for Machine Learning. He was Technical Program Chair of the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference in 2000 and General Chair in 2001. He is Past-President of the International Machine Learning Society, a member of the IMLS Board, and he also serves on the Advisory Board of the NIPS Foundation. He is President of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

Series: MSR AI Distinguished Lectures and Fireside Chats