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A New, Principled Approach to Anomaly Detection...

by Erik M Ferragut, Jason A Laska, Robert A Bridges
Publication Type
Conference Paper
Publication Date
Conference Name
International Conference of Machine Learning Applications
Conference Location
Boca Raton, Florida, United States of America
Conference Date
-

Intrusion detection is often described as having two main approaches: signature-based and anomaly-based. We argue that only unsupervised methods are suitable for detecting anomalies. However, there has been a tendency in the literature to conflate the notion of an anomaly with the notion of a malicious event. As a result, the methods used to discover anomalies have typically been ad hoc, making it nearly impossible to systematically compare between models or regulate the number of alerts. We propose a new, principled approach to anomaly detection that addresses the main shortcomings of ad hoc approaches. We provide both theoretical and cyber-specific examples to demonstrate the benefits of our more principled approach.