Post-Anomaly Detection Inference for Deep SVDD

2026-09-29

AI Summary

This study addresses the lack of statistical guarantees and uncontrollable false positive rates in Deep SVDD anomaly detection. To overcome these limitations, this work proposes the PADI framework, which introduces selective inference to a frozen Deep SVDD model for the first time. By performing rigorous statistical evaluation conditioned on detection events, the framework generates valid p-values to quantify anomaly significance. The primary contribution lies in providing theoretical guarantees for false positive rate control. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in controlling false positive rates while achieving superior true positive rates compared to existing methods.

Abstract

Deep Support Vector Data Description (Deep SVDD) has become a prominent framework for unsupervised anomaly detection by learning latent representations that compactly characterize normal data around a center. Despite its empirical success, anomaly decisions produced by Deep SVDD are typically made solely based on anomaly scores without rigorous statistical guarantees, thereby limiting their reliability in safety-critical and high-stakes applications where false positives must be strictly controlled. In this paper, we propose PADI (Post-Anomaly Detection Inference), a novel framework that equips a trained and frozen Deep SVDD detector with statistically valid inference by leveraging the Selective Inference framework. Specifically, PADI performs inference conditional on the event that a test instance is identified as anomalous by Deep SVDD, thereby enabling rigorous statistical assessment of anomaly decisions. Based on this formulation, we derive valid selective p-values that quantify the statistical significance of the detected anomaly. Using these p-values, we theoretically establish control of the false positive rate (FPR) at a user-specified significance level $α$ (e.g., $α=0.05$). Furthermore, we extend the proposed framework to Deep Semi-Supervised Anomaly Detection (Deep SAD), providing a principled approach for statistically reliable inference in semi-supervised anomaly detection settings. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmark datasets robustly support the theoretical findings. The results demonstrate that PADI consistently achieves proper FPR control while attaining superior true positive rates compared with existing approaches.

Problem

• Anomaly Detection
• Deep SVDD
• Selective Inference
• False Positive Rate Control
• Statistical Guarantee

Innovation

• Post-Anomaly Detection Inference
• Deep SVDD
• Selective Inference
• False Positive Rate Control
• Selective p-values