Constraint-Guided Autoencoders to Enforce a Predefined Threshold on Anomaly Scores:An Application in Machine Condition Monitoring

Anomaly detection(AD)is an important task in a broad range of domains.A popular choice for AD are Deep Support Vector Data Description models.When learning such models,normal data is mapped close to and anomalous data is mapped far from a center,in some latent space,enabling the construction of a sphere to separate both types of data.Empirically,it was observed:(i)that the center and radius of such sphere largely depend on the training data and model initialization which leads to difficulties when selecting a threshold,and(ii)that the center and radius of this sphere strongly impact the model AD performance on unseen data.In this work,a more robust AD solution is proposed that(i)defines a sphere with a fixed radius and margin in some latent space and(ii)enforces the encoder,which maps the input to a latent space,to encode the normal data in a small sphere and the anomalous data outside a larger sphere,with the same center.Experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm attains higher performance compared to alternatives,and that the difference in size of the two spheres has a minor impact on the performance.