Ensemble of Precision-Recall Curve (PRC) Classification Trees with Autoencoders
This work addresses anomaly detection for critical applications like network security and fraud prevention, but it is incremental as it builds on prior PRC-RF methods.
The paper tackled anomaly detection challenges of extreme class imbalance and high dimensionality by integrating PRC Random Forest with autoencoders, resulting in a model that achieved superior accuracy, scalability, and interpretability on benchmark datasets.
Anomaly detection underpins critical applications from network security and intrusion detection to fraud prevention, where recognizing aberrant patterns rapidly is indispensable. Progress in this area is routinely impeded by two obstacles: extreme class imbalance and the curse of dimensionality. To combat the former, we previously introduced Precision-Recall Curve (PRC) classification trees and their ensemble extension, the PRC Random Forest (PRC-RF). Building on that foundation, we now propose a hybrid framework that integrates PRC-RF with autoencoders, unsupervised machine learning methods that learn compact latent representations, to confront both challenges simultaneously. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmark datasets demonstrate that the resulting Autoencoder-PRC-RF model achieves superior accuracy, scalability, and interpretability relative to prior methods, affirming its potential for high-stakes anomaly-detection tasks.