Dual-MGAN: An Efficient Approach for Semi-supervised Outlier Detection with Few Identified Anomalies

Outlier detection is an important task in data mining, and many technologies for it have been explored in various applications. However, owing to the default assumption that outliers are not concentrated, unsupervised outlier detection may not correctly identify group anomalies with higher levels of density. Although high detection rates and optimal parameters can usually be achieved by using supervised outlier detection, obtaining a sufficient number of correct labels is a time-consuming task. To solve these problems, we focus on semi-supervised outlier detection with few identified anomalies and a large amount of unlabeled data. The task of semi-supervised outlier detection is first decomposed into the detection of discrete anomalies and that of partially identified group anomalies, and a distribution construction sub-module and a data augmentation sub-module are then proposed to identify them, respectively. In this way, the dual multiple generative adversarial networks (Dual-MGAN) that combine the two sub-modules can identify discrete as well as partially identified group anomalies. In addition, in view of the difficulty of determining the stop node of training, two evaluation indicators are introduced to evaluate the training status of the sub-GANs. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world data show that the proposed Dual-MGAN can significantly improve the accuracy of outlier detection, and the proposed evaluation indicators can reflect the training status of the sub-GANs.