Welcome to PyOD documentation!#

Deployment & Documentation & Stats & License

PyPI version Anaconda version Documentation status GitHub stars GitHub forks Downloads testing Coverage Status Maintainability License Benchmark

Read Me First#

Welcome to PyOD, a versatile Python library for detecting anomalies in multivariate data. Whether you’re tackling a small-scale project or large datasets, PyOD offers a range of algorithms to suit your needs.


About PyOD#

PyOD, established in 2017, has become a go-to Python library for detecting anomalous/outlying objects in multivariate data. This exciting yet challenging field is commonly referred as Outlier Detection or Anomaly Detection.

PyOD includes more than 50 detection algorithms, from classical LOF (SIGMOD 2000) to the cutting-edge ECOD and DIF (TKDE 2022 and 2023). Since 2017, PyOD has been successfully used in numerous academic researches and commercial products with more than 17 million downloads. It is also well acknowledged by the machine learning community with various dedicated posts/tutorials, including Analytics Vidhya, KDnuggets, and Towards Data Science.

PyOD is featured for:

  • Unified, User-Friendly Interface across various algorithms.

  • Wide Range of Models, from classic techniques to the latest deep learning methods.

  • High Performance & Efficiency, leveraging numba and joblib for JIT compilation and parallel processing.

  • Fast Training & Prediction, achieved through the SUOD framework [AZHC+21].

Outlier Detection with 5 Lines of Code:

# Example: Training an ECOD detector
from pyod.models.ecod import ECOD
clf = ECOD()
clf.fit(X_train)
y_train_scores = clf.decision_scores_  # Outlier scores for training data
y_test_scores = clf.decision_function(X_test)  # Outlier scores for test data

Selecting the Right Algorithm:. Unsure where to start? Consider these robust and interpretable options:

  • ECOD: Example of using ECOD for outlier detection

  • Isolation Forest: Example of using Isolation Forest for outlier detection

Alternatively, explore MetaOD for a data-driven approach.

Citing PyOD:

PyOD paper is published in Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) (MLOSS track). If you use PyOD in a scientific publication, we would appreciate citations to the following paper:

@article{zhao2019pyod,
    author  = {Zhao, Yue and Nasrullah, Zain and Li, Zheng},
    title   = {PyOD: A Python Toolbox for Scalable Outlier Detection},
    journal = {Journal of Machine Learning Research},
    year    = {2019},
    volume  = {20},
    number  = {96},
    pages   = {1-7},
    url     = {http://jmlr.org/papers/v20/19-011.html}
}

or:

Zhao, Y., Nasrullah, Z. and Li, Z., 2019. PyOD: A Python Toolbox for Scalable Outlier Detection. Journal of machine learning research (JMLR), 20(96), pp.1-7.

For a broader perspective on anomaly detection, see our NeurIPS papers ADBench: Anomaly Detection Benchmark & ADGym: Design Choices for Deep Anomaly Detection:

@article{han2022adbench,
    title={Adbench: Anomaly detection benchmark},
    author={Han, Songqiao and Hu, Xiyang and Huang, Hailiang and Jiang, Minqi and Zhao, Yue},
    journal={Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
    volume={35},
    pages={32142--32159},
    year={2022}
}

@article{jiang2023adgym,
    title={ADGym: Design Choices for Deep Anomaly Detection},
    author={Jiang, Minqi and Hou, Chaochuan and Zheng, Ao and Han, Songqiao and Huang, Hailiang and Wen, Qingsong and Hu, Xiyang and Zhao, Yue},
    journal={Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
    volume={36},
    year={2023}
}

ADBench Benchmark and Datasets#

We just released a 45-page, the most comprehensive ADBench: Anomaly Detection Benchmark [AHHH+22]. The fully open-sourced ADBench compares 30 anomaly detection algorithms on 57 benchmark datasets.

The organization of ADBench is provided below:

benchmark-fig

For a simpler visualization, we make the comparison of selected models via compare_all_models.py.

Comparison_of_All

Implemented Algorithms#

PyOD toolkit consists of three major functional groups:

(i) Individual Detection Algorithms :

Type

Abbr

Algorithm

Year

Class

Ref

Probabilistic

ECOD

Unsupervised Outlier Detection Using Empirical Cumulative Distribution Functions

2022

pyod.models.ecod.ECOD

[ALZH+22]

Probabilistic

COPOD

COPOD: Copula-Based Outlier Detection

2020

pyod.models.copod.COPOD

[ALZB+20]

Probabilistic

ABOD

Angle-Based Outlier Detection

2008

pyod.models.abod.ABOD

[AKZ+08]

Probabilistic

FastABOD

Fast Angle-Based Outlier Detection using approximation

2008

pyod.models.abod.ABOD

[AKZ+08]

Probabilistic

MAD

Median Absolute Deviation (MAD)

1993

pyod.models.mad.MAD

[AIH93]

Probabilistic

SOS

Stochastic Outlier Selection

2012

pyod.models.sos.SOS

[AJHuszarPvdH12]

Probabilistic

QMCD

Quasi-Monte Carlo Discrepancy outlier detection

2001

pyod.models.qmcd.QMCD

[AFM01]

Probabilistic

KDE

Outlier Detection with Kernel Density Functions

2007

pyod.models.kde.KDE

[ALLP07]

Probabilistic

Sampling

Rapid distance-based outlier detection via sampling

2013

pyod.models.sampling.Sampling

[ASB13]

Probabilistic

GMM

Probabilistic Mixture Modeling for Outlier Analysis

pyod.models.gmm.GMM

[AAgg15] [Ch.2]

Linear Model

PCA

Principal Component Analysis (the sum of weighted projected distances to the eigenvector hyperplanes)

2003

pyod.models.pca.PCA

[ASCSC03]

Linear Model

KPCA

Kernel Principal Component Analysis

2007

pyod.models.kpca.KPCA

[AHof07]

Linear Model

MCD

Minimum Covariance Determinant (use the mahalanobis distances as the outlier scores)

1999

pyod.models.mcd.MCD

[AHR04, ARD99]

Linear Model

CD

Use Cook’s distance for outlier detection

1977

pyod.models.cd.CD

[ACoo77]

Linear Model

OCSVM

One-Class Support Vector Machines

2001

pyod.models.ocsvm.OCSVM

[AScholkopfPST+01]

Linear Model

LMDD

Deviation-based Outlier Detection (LMDD)

1996

pyod.models.lmdd.LMDD

[AAAR96]

Proximity-Based

LOF

Local Outlier Factor

2000

pyod.models.lof.LOF

[ABKNS00]

Proximity-Based

COF

Connectivity-Based Outlier Factor

2002

pyod.models.cof.COF

[ATCFC02]

Proximity-Based

Incr. COF

Memory Efficient Connectivity-Based Outlier Factor (slower but reduce storage complexity)

2002

pyod.models.cof.COF

[ATCFC02]

Proximity-Based

CBLOF

Clustering-Based Local Outlier Factor

2003

pyod.models.cblof.CBLOF

[AHXD03]

Proximity-Based

LOCI

LOCI: Fast outlier detection using the local correlation integral

2003

pyod.models.loci.LOCI

[APKGF03]

Proximity-Based

HBOS

Histogram-based Outlier Score

2012

pyod.models.hbos.HBOS

[AGD12]

Proximity-Based

kNN

k Nearest Neighbors (use the distance to the kth nearest neighbor as the outlier score

2000

pyod.models.knn.KNN

[AAP02, ARRS00]

Proximity-Based

AvgKNN

Average kNN (use the average distance to k nearest neighbors as the outlier score)

2002

pyod.models.knn.KNN

[AAP02, ARRS00]

Proximity-Based

MedKNN

Median kNN (use the median distance to k nearest neighbors as the outlier score)

2002

pyod.models.knn.KNN

[AAP02, ARRS00]

Proximity-Based

SOD

Subspace Outlier Detection

2009

pyod.models.sod.SOD

[AKKrogerSZ09]

Proximity-Based

ROD

Rotation-based Outlier Detection

2020

pyod.models.rod.ROD

[AABC20]

Outlier Ensembles

IForest

Isolation Forest

2008

pyod.models.iforest.IForest

[ALTZ08, ALTZ12]

Outlier Ensembles

INNE

Isolation-based Anomaly Detection Using Nearest-Neighbor Ensembles

2018

pyod.models.inne.INNE

[ABTA+18]

Outlier Ensembles

DIF

Deep Isolation Forest for Anomaly Detection

2023

pyod.models.dif.DIF

[]

Outlier Ensembles

FB

Feature Bagging

2005

pyod.models.feature_bagging.FeatureBagging

[ALK05]

Outlier Ensembles

LSCP

LSCP: Locally Selective Combination of Parallel Outlier Ensembles

2019

pyod.models.lscp.LSCP

[AZNHL19]

Outlier Ensembles

XGBOD

Extreme Boosting Based Outlier Detection (Supervised)

2018

pyod.models.xgbod.XGBOD

[AZH18]

Outlier Ensembles

LODA

Lightweight On-line Detector of Anomalies

2016

pyod.models.loda.LODA

[APevny16]

Outlier Ensembles

SUOD

SUOD: Accelerating Large-scale Unsupervised Heterogeneous Outlier Detection (Acceleration)

2021

pyod.models.suod.SUOD

[AZHC+21]

Neural Networks

AutoEncoder

Fully connected AutoEncoder (use reconstruction error as the outlier score)

2015

pyod.models.auto_encoder.AutoEncoder

[AAgg15] [Ch.3]

Neural Networks

VAE

Variational AutoEncoder (use reconstruction error as the outlier score)

2013

pyod.models.vae.VAE

[AKW13]

Neural Networks

Beta-VAE

Variational AutoEncoder (all customized loss term by varying gamma and capacity)

2018

pyod.models.vae.VAE

[ABHP+18]

Neural Networks

SO_GAAL

Single-Objective Generative Adversarial Active Learning

2019

pyod.models.so_gaal.SO_GAAL

[ALLZ+19]

Neural Networks

MO_GAAL

Multiple-Objective Generative Adversarial Active Learning

2019

pyod.models.mo_gaal.MO_GAAL

[ALLZ+19]

Neural Networks

DeepSVDD

Deep One-Class Classification

2018

pyod.models.deep_svdd.DeepSVDD

[ARVG+18]

Neural Networks

AnoGAN

Anomaly Detection with Generative Adversarial Networks

2017

pyod.models.anogan.AnoGAN

[ASSeebockW+17]

Neural Networks

ALAD

Adversarially learned anomaly detection

2018

pyod.models.alad.ALAD

[AZRF+18]

Graph-based

R-Graph

Outlier detection by R-graph

2017

pyod.models.rgraph.RGraph

[BYRV17]

Graph-based

LUNAR

LUNAR: Unifying Local Outlier Detection Methods via Graph Neural Networks

2022

pyod.models.lunar.LUNAR

[AGHNN22]

(ii) Outlier Ensembles & Outlier Detector Combination Frameworks:

Type

Abbr

Algorithm

Year

Ref

Outlier Ensembles

Feature Bagging

2005

pyod.models.feature_bagging.FeatureBagging

[ALK05]

Outlier Ensembles

LSCP

LSCP: Locally Selective Combination of Parallel Outlier Ensembles

2019

pyod.models.lscp.LSCP

[AZNHL19]

Outlier Ensembles

XGBOD

Extreme Boosting Based Outlier Detection (Supervised)

2018

pyod.models.xgbod.XGBOD

[AZH18]

Outlier Ensembles

LODA

Lightweight On-line Detector of Anomalies

2016

pyod.models.loda.LODA

[APevny16]

Outlier Ensembles

SUOD

SUOD: Accelerating Large-scale Unsupervised Heterogeneous Outlier Detection (Acceleration)

2021

pyod.models.suod.SUOD

[AZHC+21]

Combination

Average

Simple combination by averaging the scores

2015

pyod.models.combination.average()

[AAS15]

Combination

Weighted Average

Simple combination by averaging the scores with detector weights

2015

pyod.models.combination.average()

[AAS15]

Combination

Maximization

Simple combination by taking the maximum scores

2015

pyod.models.combination.maximization()

[AAS15]

Combination

AOM

Average of Maximum

2015

pyod.models.combination.aom()

[AAS15]

Combination

MOA

Maximum of Average

2015

pyod.models.combination.moa()

[AAS15]

Combination

Median

Simple combination by taking the median of the scores

2015

pyod.models.combination.median()

[AAS15]

Combination

majority Vote

Simple combination by taking the majority vote of the labels (weights can be used)

2015

pyod.models.combination.majority_vote()

[AAS15]

(iii) Utility Functions:

Type

Name

Function

Data

pyod.utils.data.generate_data()

Synthesized data generation; normal data is generated by a multivariate Gaussian and outliers are generated by a uniform distribution

Data

pyod.utils.data.generate_data_clusters()

Synthesized data generation in clusters; more complex data patterns can be created with multiple clusters

Stat

pyod.utils.stat_models.wpearsonr()

Calculate the weighted Pearson correlation of two samples

Utility

pyod.utils.utility.get_label_n()

Turn raw outlier scores into binary labels by assign 1 to top n outlier scores

Utility

pyod.utils.utility.precision_n_scores()

calculate precision @ rank n

The comparison among of implemented models is made available below (Figure, compare_all_models.py, Interactive Jupyter Notebooks). For Jupyter Notebooks, please navigate to “/notebooks/Compare All Models.ipynb”.

Comparison of selected models

Check the latest benchmark. You could replicate this process by running benchmark.py.

API Cheatsheet & Reference#

The following APIs are applicable for all detector models for easy use.

Key Attributes of a fitted model:

  • pyod.models.base.BaseDetector.decision_scores_: The outlier scores of the training data. The higher, the more abnormal. Outliers tend to have higher scores.

  • pyod.models.base.BaseDetector.labels_: The binary labels of the training data. 0 stands for inliers and 1 for outliers/anomalies.



References

[AAgg15] (1,2)

Charu C Aggarwal. Outlier analysis. In Data mining, 75–79. Springer, 2015.

[AAS15] (1,2,3,4,5,6,7)

Charu C Aggarwal and Saket Sathe. Theoretical foundations and algorithms for outlier ensembles. ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter, 17(1):24–47, 2015.

[AABC20]

Yahya Almardeny, Noureddine Boujnah, and Frances Cleary. A novel outlier detection method for multivariate data. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 2020.

[AAP02] (1,2,3)

Fabrizio Angiulli and Clara Pizzuti. Fast outlier detection in high dimensional spaces. In European Conference on Principles of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 15–27. Springer, 2002.

[AAAR96]

Andreas Arning, Rakesh Agrawal, and Prabhakar Raghavan. A linear method for deviation detection in large databases. In KDD, volume 1141, 972–981. 1996.

[ABTA+18]

Tharindu R Bandaragoda, Kai Ming Ting, David Albrecht, Fei Tony Liu, Ye Zhu, and Jonathan R Wells. Isolation-based anomaly detection using nearest-neighbor ensembles. Computational Intelligence, 34(4):968–998, 2018.

[ABKNS00]

Markus M Breunig, Hans-Peter Kriegel, Raymond T Ng, and Jörg Sander. Lof: identifying density-based local outliers. In ACM sigmod record, volume 29, 93–104. ACM, 2000.

[ABHP+18]

Christopher P Burgess, Irina Higgins, Arka Pal, Loic Matthey, Nick Watters, Guillaume Desjardins, and Alexander Lerchner. Understanding disentangling in betvae. arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.03599, 2018.

[ACoo77]

R Dennis Cook. Detection of influential observation in linear regression. Technometrics, 19(1):15–18, 1977.

[AFM01]

Kai-Tai Fang and Chang-Xing Ma. Wrap-around l2-discrepancy of random sampling, latin hypercube and uniform designs. Journal of complexity, 17(4):608–624, 2001.

[AGD12]

Markus Goldstein and Andreas Dengel. Histogram-based outlier score (hbos): a fast unsupervised anomaly detection algorithm. KI-2012: Poster and Demo Track, pages 59–63, 2012.

[AGHNN22]

Adam Goodge, Bryan Hooi, See-Kiong Ng, and Wee Siong Ng. Lunar: unifying local outlier detection methods via graph neural networks. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, volume 36, 6737–6745. 2022.

[AHHH+22]

Songqiao Han, Xiyang Hu, Hailiang Huang, Mingqi Jiang, and Yue Zhao. Adbench: anomaly detection benchmark. arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.09426, 2022.

[AHR04]

Johanna Hardin and David M Rocke. Outlier detection in the multiple cluster setting using the minimum covariance determinant estimator. Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, 44(4):625–638, 2004.

[AHXD03]

Zengyou He, Xiaofei Xu, and Shengchun Deng. Discovering cluster-based local outliers. Pattern Recognition Letters, 24(9-10):1641–1650, 2003.

[AHof07]

Heiko Hoffmann. Kernel pca for novelty detection. Pattern recognition, 40(3):863–874, 2007.

[AIH93]

Boris Iglewicz and David Caster Hoaglin. How to detect and handle outliers. Volume 16. Asq Press, 1993.

[AJHuszarPvdH12]

JHM Janssens, Ferenc Huszár, EO Postma, and HJ van den Herik. Stochastic outlier selection. Technical Report, Technical report TiCC TR 2012-001, Tilburg University, Tilburg Center for Cognition and Communication, Tilburg, The Netherlands, 2012.

[AKW13]

Diederik P Kingma and Max Welling. Auto-encoding variational bayes. arXiv preprint arXiv:1312.6114, 2013.

[AKKrogerSZ09]

Hans-Peter Kriegel, Peer Kröger, Erich Schubert, and Arthur Zimek. Outlier detection in axis-parallel subspaces of high dimensional data. In Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 831–838. Springer, 2009.

[AKZ+08] (1,2)

Hans-Peter Kriegel, Arthur Zimek, and others. Angle-based outlier detection in high-dimensional data. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining, 444–452. ACM, 2008.

[ALLP07]

Longin Jan Latecki, Aleksandar Lazarevic, and Dragoljub Pokrajac. Outlier detection with kernel density functions. In International Workshop on Machine Learning and Data Mining in Pattern Recognition, 61–75. Springer, 2007.

[ALK05] (1,2)

Aleksandar Lazarevic and Vipin Kumar. Feature bagging for outlier detection. In Proceedings of the eleventh ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery in data mining, 157–166. ACM, 2005.

[ALZB+20]

Zheng Li, Yue Zhao, Nicola Botta, Cezar Ionescu, and Xiyang Hu. COPOD: copula-based outlier detection. In IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM). IEEE, 2020.

[ALZH+22]

Zheng Li, Yue Zhao, Xiyang Hu, Nicola Botta, Cezar Ionescu, and H. George Chen. Ecod: unsupervised outlier detection using empirical cumulative distribution functions. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 2022.

[ALTZ08]

Fei Tony Liu, Kai Ming Ting, and Zhi-Hua Zhou. Isolation forest. In Data Mining, 2008. ICDM'08. Eighth IEEE International Conference on, 413–422. IEEE, 2008.

[ALTZ12]

Fei Tony Liu, Kai Ming Ting, and Zhi-Hua Zhou. Isolation-based anomaly detection. ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD), 6(1):3, 2012.

[ALLZ+19] (1,2)

Yezheng Liu, Zhe Li, Chong Zhou, Yuanchun Jiang, Jianshan Sun, Meng Wang, and Xiangnan He. Generative adversarial active learning for unsupervised outlier detection. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 2019.

[APKGF03]

Spiros Papadimitriou, Hiroyuki Kitagawa, Phillip B Gibbons, and Christos Faloutsos. Loci: fast outlier detection using the local correlation integral. In Data Engineering, 2003. Proceedings. 19th International Conference on, 315–326. IEEE, 2003.

[APevny16] (1,2)

Tomáš Pevn\`y. Loda: lightweight on-line detector of anomalies. Machine Learning, 102(2):275–304, 2016.

[ARRS00] (1,2,3)

Sridhar Ramaswamy, Rajeev Rastogi, and Kyuseok Shim. Efficient algorithms for mining outliers from large data sets. In ACM Sigmod Record, volume 29, 427–438. ACM, 2000.

[ARD99]

Peter J Rousseeuw and Katrien Van Driessen. A fast algorithm for the minimum covariance determinant estimator. Technometrics, 41(3):212–223, 1999.

[ARVG+18]

Lukas Ruff, Robert Vandermeulen, Nico Görnitz, Lucas Deecke, Shoaib Siddiqui, Alexander Binder, Emmanuel Müller, and Marius Kloft. Deep one-class classification. International conference on machine learning, 2018.

[ASSeebockW+17]

Thomas Schlegl, Philipp Seeböck, Sebastian M Waldstein, Ursula Schmidt-Erfurth, and Georg Langs. Unsupervised anomaly detection with generative adversarial networks to guide marker discovery. In International conference on information processing in medical imaging, 146–157. Springer, 2017.

[AScholkopfPST+01]

Bernhard Schölkopf, John C Platt, John Shawe-Taylor, Alex J Smola, and Robert C Williamson. Estimating the support of a high-dimensional distribution. Neural computation, 13(7):1443–1471, 2001.

[ASCSC03]

Mei-Ling Shyu, Shu-Ching Chen, Kanoksri Sarinnapakorn, and LiWu Chang. A novel anomaly detection scheme based on principal component classifier. Technical Report, MIAMI UNIV CORAL GABLES FL DEPT OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING, 2003.

[ASB13]

Mahito Sugiyama and Karsten Borgwardt. Rapid distance-based outlier detection via sampling. Advances in neural information processing systems, 2013.

[ATCFC02] (1,2)

Jian Tang, Zhixiang Chen, Ada Wai-Chee Fu, and David W Cheung. Enhancing effectiveness of outlier detections for low density patterns. In Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 535–548. Springer, 2002.

[AZRF+18]

Houssam Zenati, Manon Romain, Chuan-Sheng Foo, Bruno Lecouat, and Vijay Chandrasekhar. Adversarially learned anomaly detection. In 2018 IEEE International conference on data mining (ICDM), 727–736. IEEE, 2018.

[AZH18] (1,2)

Yue Zhao and Maciej K Hryniewicki. Xgbod: improving supervised outlier detection with unsupervised representation learning. In International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN). IEEE, 2018.

[AZHC+21] (1,2,3)

Yue Zhao, Xiyang Hu, Cheng Cheng, Cong Wang, Changlin Wan, Wen Wang, Jianing Yang, Haoping Bai, Zheng Li, Cao Xiao, Yunlong Wang, Zhi Qiao, Jimeng Sun, and Leman Akoglu. Suod: accelerating large-scale unsupervised heterogeneous outlier detection. Proceedings of Machine Learning and Systems, 2021.

[AZNHL19] (1,2)

Yue Zhao, Zain Nasrullah, Maciej K Hryniewicki, and Zheng Li. LSCP: locally selective combination in parallel outlier ensembles. In Proceedings of the 2019 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining, SDM 2019, 585–593. Calgary, Canada, May 2019. SIAM. URL: https://doi.org/10.1137/1.9781611975673.66, doi:10.1137/1.9781611975673.66.