Optimal Kullback-Leibler Aggregation via Information Bottleneck

In this paper, we present a method for reducing a regular, discrete-time Markov chain (DTMC) to another DTMC with a given, typically much smaller number of states. The cost of reduction is defined as the Kullback-Leibler divergence rate between a projection of the original process through a partition function and a DTMC on the correspondingly partitioned state space. Finding the reduced model with minimal cost is computationally expensive, as it requires an exhaustive search among all state space partitions, and an exact evaluation of the reduction cost for each candidate partition. Our approach deals with the latter problem by minimizing an upper bound on the reduction cost instead of minimizing the exact cost; The proposed upper bound is easy to compute and it is tight if the original chain is lumpable with respect to the partition. Then, we express the problem in the form of information bottleneck optimization, and propose using the agglomerative information bottleneck algorithm for searching a sub-optimal partition greedily, rather than exhaustively. The theory is illustrated with examples and one application scenario in the context of modeling bio-molecular interactions.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure

Online Anomaly Detection Under Markov Statistics With Controllable Type-I Error

We study anomaly detection for fast streaming temporal data with real time Type-I error, i.e., false alarm rate, controllability; and propose a computationally highly efficient online algorithm, which closely achieves a specified false alarm rate while maximizing the detection power. Regardless of whether the source is stationary or nonstationary, the proposed algorithm sequentially receives a time series and learns the nominal attributes - in the online setting - under possibly varying Markov statistics. Then, an anomaly is declared at a time instance, if the observations are statistically sufficiently deviant. Moreover, the proposed algorithm is remarkably versatile since it does not require parameter tuning to match the desired rates even in the case of strong nonstationarity. The presented study is the first to provide the online implementation of Neyman-Pearson (NP) characterization for the problem such that the NP optimality, i.e., maximum detection power at a specified false alarm rate, is nearly achieved in a truly online manner. In this regard, the proposed algorithm is highly novel and appropriate especially for the applications requiring sequential data processing at large scales/high rates due to its parameter-tuning free computational efficient design with the practical NP constraints under stationary or non-stationary source statistics. © 2015 IEEE