Automated anomaly detection for categorical data by repurposing a form filling recommender system
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Data quality is crucial in modern software systems, like data-driven decision support systems. However, data quality is affected by data anomalies, which represent instances that deviate from most of the data. These anomalies affect the reliability and trustworthiness of software systems, and may propagate and cause more issues. Although many anomaly detection approaches have been proposed, they mainly focus on numerical data. Moreover, the few approaches targeting anomaly detection for categorical data do not yield consistent results across datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel anomaly detection approach for categorical data named LAFF-AD (LAFF-based Anomaly Detection), which takes advantage of the learning ability of a state-of-the-art form filling tool (LAFF) to perform value inference on suspicious data. LAFF-AD runs a variant of LAFF that predicts the possible values of a suspicious categorical field in the suspicious instance. LAFF-AD then compares the output of LAFF to the recorded values in the suspicious instance, and uses a heuristic-based strategy to detect categorical data anomalies. We evaluated LAFF-AD by assessing its effectiveness and efficiency on six datasets. Our experimental results show that LAFF-AD can accurately determine a high range of data anomalies, with recall values between 0.6 and 1 and a precision value of at least 0.808. Furthermore, LAFF-AD is efficient, taking at most 7000 s and 735 ms to perform training and prediction, respectively.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it