Online Detection of Sparse Changes in High-Dimensional Data Streams Using Tailored Projections

When applying principal component analysis (PCA) for dimension reduction, the most varying projections are usually used in order to retain most of the information. For the purpose of anomaly and change detection, however, the least varying projections are often the most important ones. In this article, we present a novel method that automatically tailors the choice of projections to monitor for sparse changes in the mean and/or covariance matrix of high-dimensional data. A subset of the least varying projections is almost always selected based on a criteria of the projection's sensitivity to changes. Our focus is on online/sequential change detection, where the aim is to detect changes as quickly as possible, while controlling false alarms at a specified level. A combination of tailored PCA and a generalized log-likelihood monitoring procedure displays high efficiency in detecting even very sparse changes in the mean, variance and correlation. We demonstrate on real data that tailored PCA monitoring is efficient for sparse change detection also when the data streams are highly auto-correlated and non-normal. Notably, error control is achieved without a large validation set, which is needed in most existing methods.