Entropy Measures for Stochastic Processes with Applications in Functional Anomaly Detection

Entropy (Basel). 2018 Jan 11;20(1):33. doi: 10.3390/e20010033.

Abstract

We propose a definition of entropy for stochastic processes. We provide a reproducing kernel Hilbert space model to estimate entropy from a random sample of realizations of a stochastic process, namely functional data, and introduce two approaches to estimate minimum entropy sets. These sets are relevant to detect anomalous or outlier functional data. A numerical experiment illustrates the performance of the proposed method; in addition, we conduct an analysis of mortality rate curves as an interesting application in a real-data context to explore functional anomaly detection.

Keywords: anomaly detection; entropy; functional data; minimum-entropy sets; stochastic process.