Baselines

.gitignore

@@ -157,4 +157,6 @@ Thumbs.db
 *~
 *.swp
 
+# miscellanous
 .DS_Store
+paper-examples/data

README.md

@@ -1,4 +1,6 @@
-# signature_mahalanobis_knn
+# SigMahaKNN - Signature Mahalanobis KNN method
+
+## Anamoly detection on multivariate streams with Variance Norm and Path Signature
 
 [![Actions Status][actions-badge]][actions-link]
 [![Documentation Status][rtd-badge]][rtd-link]
@@ -22,3 +24,98 @@
 [rtd-link]:                 https://signature_mahalanobis_knn.readthedocs.io/en/latest/?badge=latest
 
 <!-- prettier-ignore-end -->
+
+SigMahaKNN (`signature_mahalanobis_knn`) combines the variance norm (a
+generalisation of the Mahalanobis distance) with path signatures for anomaly
+detection for multivariate streams. The `signature_mahalanobis_knn` library is a
+Python implementation of the SigMahaKNN method. The key contributions of this
+library are:
+
+- A simple and efficient implementation of the variance norm distance as
+  provided by the `signature_mahalanobis_knn.Mahalanobis` class. The class has
+  two main methods:
+  - The `fit` method to fit the variance norm distance to a training datase
+  - The `distance` method to compute the distance between two `numpy` arrays
+    `x1` and `x2`
+- A simple and efficient implementation of the SigMahaKNN method as provided by
+  the `signature_mahalanobis_knn.SigMahaKNN` class. The class has two main
+  methods:
+  - The `fit` method to fit a model to a training dataset
+    - The `fit` method can take in a corpus of streams as its input (where we
+      will compute path signatures of using the `sktime` library with `esig` or
+      `iisignature`) _or_ a corpus of path signatures as its input. This also
+      opens up the possibility of using other feature represenations and
+      applications of using the variance norm distance for anomaly detection
+    - Currently, the library uses either `sklearn`'s `NearestNeighbors` class or
+      `pynndescent`'s `NNDescent` class to efficiently compute the nearest
+      neighbour distances of a new data point to the corpus training data
+  - The `conformance` method to compute the conformance score for a set of new
+    data points
+    - Similarly to the `fit` method, the `conformance` method can take in a
+      corpus of streams as its input (where we will compute path signatures of
+      using the `sktime` library with `esig` or `iisignature`) _or_ a corpus of
+      path signatures as its input
+
+## Installation
+
+The SigMahaKNN library is available on PyPI and can be installed with `pip`:
+
+```bash
+pip install signature_mahalanobis_knn
+```
+
+## Usage
+
+As noted above, the `signature_mahalanobis_knn` library has two main classes:
+`Mahalanobis`, a class for computing the variance norm distance, and
+`SigMahaKNN`, a class for computing the conformance score for a set of new data
+points.
+
+### Computing the variance norm distance
+
+### Using the SigMahaKNN method for anomaly detection
+
+## Repo structure
+
+The core implementation of the SigMahaKNN method is in the
+`src/signature_mahalanobis_knn` folder:
+
+- `mahal_distance.py` contains the implementation of the `Mahalanobis` class to
+  compute the variance norm distance
+- `sig_maha_knn.py` contains the implementation of the `SigMahaKNN` class to
+  compute the conformance scores for a set of new data points against a corpus
+  of training data
+- `utils.py` contains some utility functions that are useful for the library
+- `baselines/` is a folder containing some of the baseline methods we look at in
+  the paper - see [paper-examples/README.md](paper-examples/README.md) for more
+  details
+
+## Examples
+
+There are various examples in the `examples` and `paper-examples` folder:
+
+- `examples` contains small examples using randomly generated data for
+  illustration purposes
+- `paper-examples` contains the examples used in the paper (link available
+  soon!) where we compare the SigMahaKNN method to other baseline approaches
+  (e.g. Isolation Forest and Local Outlier Factor) on real-world datasets
+  - There are notebooks for downloading and preprocessing the datasets for the
+    examples - see [paper-examples/README.md](paper-examples/README.md) for more
+    details
+
+## Contributing
+
+To take advantage of `pre-commit`, which will automatically format your code and
+run some basic checks before you commit:
+
+```
+pip install pre-commit  # or brew install pre-commit on macOS
+pre-commit install  # will install a pre-commit hook into the git repo
+```
+
+After doing this, each time you commit, some linters will be applied to format
+the codebase. You can also/alternatively run `pre-commit run --all-files` to run
+the checks.
+
+See [CONTRIBUTING.md](CONTRIBUTING.md) for more information on running the test
+suite using `nox`.