{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/can-tree-based-approaches-surpass-deep","title":"Can Tree Based Approaches Surpass Deep Learning in Anomaly Detection? A Benchmarking Study","arxiv_id":"2402.07281","date":"2024-02-11","proceeding":null,"authors":["Santonu Sarkar","Shanay Mehta","Nicole Fernandes","Jyotirmoy Sarkar","Snehanshu Saha"],"abstract":"Detection of anomalous situations for complex mission-critical systems holds paramount importance when their service continuity needs to be ensured. A major challenge in detecting anomalies from the operational data arises due to the imbalanced class distribution problem since the anomalies are supposed to be rare events. This paper evaluates a diverse array of machine learning-based anomaly detection algorithms through a comprehensive benchmark study. The paper contributes significantly by conducting an unbiased comparison of various anomaly detection algorithms, spanning classical machine learning including various tree-based approaches to deep learning and outlier detection methods. The inclusion of 104 publicly available and a few proprietary industrial systems datasets enhances the diversity of the study, allowing for a more realistic evaluation of algorithm performance and emphasizing the importance of adaptability to real-world scenarios. The paper dispels the deep learning myth, demonstrating that though powerful, deep learning is not a universal solution in this case. We observed that recently proposed tree-based evolutionary algorithms outperform in many scenarios. We noticed that tree-based approaches catch a singleton anomaly in a dataset where deep learning methods fail. On the other hand, classical SVM performs the best on datasets with more than 10% anomalies, implying that such scenarios can be best modeled as a classification problem rather than anomaly detection. To our knowledge, such a study on a large number of state-of-the-art algorithms using diverse data sets, with the objective of guiding researchers and practitioners in making informed algorithmic choices, has not been attempted earlier.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.07281v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.07281v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"can-tree-based-approaches-surpass-deep","repo_url":"https://github.com/shanay-mehta/anomaly-benchmarking","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"anomaly-detection","task_name":"Anomaly Detection"},{"task_slug":"benchmarking","task_name":"Benchmarking"},{"task_slug":"deep-learning","task_name":"Deep Learning"},{"task_slug":"evolutionary-algorithms","task_name":"Evolutionary Algorithms"},{"task_slug":"outlier-detection","task_name":"Outlier Detection"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":null,"method_name":null},{"method_slug":"svm","method_name":"SVM"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}