Self-Supervised Anomaly Detection With Neural Transformations

Data augmentation plays a critical role in self-supervised learning, including anomaly detection. While hand-crafted transformations such as image rotations can achieve impressive performance on image data, effective transformations of non-image data are lacking. In this work, we study learning such transformations for end-to-end anomaly detection on arbitrary data. We find that a contrastive loss–which encourages learning diverse data transformations while preserving the relevant semantic content of the data–is more suitable than previously proposed losses for transformation learning, a fact that we prove theoretically and empirically. We demonstrate that anomaly detection using neural transformation learning can achieve state-of-the-art results for time series data, tabular data, text data and graph data. Furthermore, our approach can make image anomaly detection more interpretable by learning transformations at different levels of abstraction.