The Elliptical Basis Function Data Descriptor (EBFDD) Network: A One-Class Classification Approach to Anomaly Detection

Abstract

This paper introduces the Elliptical Basis Function Data Descriptor (EBFDD) network, a one-class classification approach to anomaly detection based on Radial Basis Function (RBF) neural networks. The EBFDD network uses elliptical basis functions, which allows it to learn sophisticated decision boundaries while retaining the advantages of a shallow network. We have proposed a novel cost function, whose minimisation results in a trained anomaly detector that only requires examples of the normal class at training time. The paper includes a large benchmark experiment that evaluates the performance of EBFDD network and compares it to state of the art one-class classification algorithms including the One-Class Support Vector Machine and the Isolation Forest. The experiments show that, overall, the EBFDD network outperforms the state of the art approaches.