FDR Control for Online Anomaly Detection

A new online multiple testing procedure is described in the context of anomaly detection, which controls the False Discovery Rate (FDR). An accurate anomaly detector must control the false positive rate at a prescribed level while keeping the false negative rate as low as possible. However in the online context, such a constraint remains highly challenging due to the usual lack of FDR control: the online framework makes it impossible to use classical multiple testing approaches such as the Benjamini-Hochberg (BH) procedure, which would require knowing the entire time series. The developed strategy relies on exploiting the local control of the ``modified FDR'' (mFDR) criterion. It turns out that the local control of mFDR enables global control of the FDR over the full series up to additional modifications of the multiple testing procedures. An important ingredient in this control is the cardinality of the calibration dataset used to compute the empirical p-values. A dedicated strategy for tuning this parameter is designed for achieving the prescribed FDR control over the entire time series. The good statistical performance of the full strategy is analyzed by theoretical guarantees. Its practical behavior is assessed by several simulation experiments which support our conclusions.