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Witnesses Explain Anomalies

Unsupervised anomaly detection scores each point of an unlabelled, contaminated sample in a single pass, and increasingly must also explain why a…

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Why am I seeing this Ranked on source trust — arXiv

It ranks mainly on source trust: arXiv is the most reliable outlet we track on this subject, and is the only one on the story so far.

It clears the bar without leading strongly on any one factor. A middling score is not a claim that the story is important — only that nothing about it is weak.

Link-outLink-out, because it scores 0.40, below the 0.50 bar for a write-up. Link-out means we point at the publisher and say nothing of our own.

Blended score 0.398 — every figure below is computed, none of it is editorial.
FactorWeightScore ContributionWhere it came from
Corroboration 0.35 0.39 +0.135 34% 1 independent org on the story. Tier-3 aggregators never corroborate — they can show something is circulating, never that it is true.
Source trustleads 0.25 0.85 +0.212 53% arXiv is the highest-trust source on this story and is first-party — the organisation announcing its own news. Trust is taken from the best source, not averaged.
Pickup rate 0.20 0.00 +0.000 0% One counted organisation, so there is no spread to measure — nothing has picked this up to set a rate.
Freshness 0.20 0.25 +0.050 13% Halves every 10 hours from the newest item on the story. This is the only factor that rewards a story for nothing more than being recent.

Corroboration counts distinct organisations, once each, and only from tiers 1 and 2. Freshness halves every 10 hours, so this ranking is a snapshot and will differ at the next build.

U.S. Navy. Naval Aerospace Medical Research Laboratory · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons · illustrative
Read the full article at Arxiv →

What happened

Unsupervised anomaly detection scores each point of an unlabelled, contaminated sample in a single pass, and increasingly must also explain why a point is flagged. Yet the dominant detectors give a score with no account of which features drive it, and explanations are bolted on post-hoc with SHAP or LIME, which re-query the detector thousands of times per point and only approximate it. We introduce WAND, an unsupervised tabular anomaly detector that is explainable by design. WAND organises its computation around directions on the unit sphere, scoring each point by how far its projection escapes a sub-Gaussian extreme-value baseline.

1independent orgs
40story score
0velocity
85source trust
4passes seen

How this story arrived

Ordered by when each source was first observed, which is what the velocity figure is computed from. Publishers backdate; observed order does not.

  1. 01 Arxivfirst-party first seen Witnesses Explain Anomalies

Overclock clusters coverage from independent sources and grades it automatically. The figures above are computed, not editorial. This page summarises and links to reporting by the outlets named — follow the links for the original work.