Anomalies are essentially abnormal patterns in a series that are irregular deviations from the expected behavior. For example, many of us have watched a cricket match. One form of getting out in this game is to be caught out, and before the ball travels straight to the hands of a fielder, it has to touch the bat of a batsman. If the stadium is very noisy, sometimes it is too difficult for anyone to judge whether the ball has touched the bat or not. To solve this problem, umpires use a device called the snickometer to help them make the call. The snickometer uses the sound from the stump mic to generate a plot of the mic's sound. If the plot is a straight line, then the ball did not make contact with the bat; otherwise, the plot will show a spike. Therefore, a spike is a sign of an anomaly. Another example of an anomaly could be the detection of a malignant tumor in a scan.
Anomaly detection is a technique that we can use to figure out aberrant behavior. An anomaly can also...