Multi-Class Hypersphere Anomaly Detection

Machine learning-based classification algorithms typically operate under assumptions that assert that the underlying data generating distribution is stationary and draws from a finite set of categories. In some scenarios, these assumptions might not hold, but identifying violating inputs - here referred to as anomalies - is a challenging task. Recent publications propose deep learning-based approaches that perform anomaly detection and classification jointly by (implicitly) learning a mapping that projects data points to a lower-dimensional space, such that the images of points of one class reside inside of a hypersphere, while others are mapped outside of it. In this work, we propose Multi-Class Hypersphere Anomaly Detection (MCHAD), a new hypersphere learning algorithm for anomaly detection in classification settings, as well as a generalization of existing hypersphere learning methods that allows incorporating example anomalies into the training. Extensive experiments on competitive benchmark tasks, as well as theoretical arguments, provide evidence for the effectiveness of our method. Our code is publicly available ¹ .