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Show HN: Adversarial Generation of Extreme Samples (arxiv.org)
35 points by arjit_jain on Sep 22, 2020 | hide | past | pdf | 4 comments on HN

In plain words: A generator is trained to make realistic yet extreme scenarios, using extreme value theory so users can pick how extreme and how rare a sample is. On US rainfall data it produced believable extremes, and rarer samples took constant time, not time growing with rarity.

Abstract · ExGAN: Adversarial Generation of Extreme Samples

Mitigating the risk arising from extreme events is a fundamental goal with many applications, such as the modelling of natural disasters, financial crashes, epidemics, and many others. To manage this risk, a vital step is to be able to understand or generate a wide range of extreme scenarios. Existing approaches based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) excel at generating realistic samples, but seek to generate typical samples, rather than extreme samples. Hence, in this work, we propose ExGAN, a GAN-based approach to generate realistic and extreme samples. To model the extremes of the training distribution in a principled way, our work draws from Extreme Value Theory (EVT), a probabilistic approach for modelling the extreme tails of distributions. For practical utility, our framework allows the user to specify both the desired extremeness measure, as well as the desired extremeness probability they wish to sample at. Experiments on real US Precipitation data show that our method generates realistic samples, based on visual inspection and quantitative measures, in an efficient manner. Moreover, generating increasingly extreme examples using ExGAN can be done in constant time (with respect to the extremeness probability $τ$), as opposed to the $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}τ)$ time required by the baseline approach.

Siddharth Bhatia, Arjit Jain, Bryan Hooi
arXiv:2009.08454 · cs.LG, cs.AI, stat.ML · submitted Sep 17, 2020 · updated Mar 15, 2021
abstract · pdf · html · AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2021

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Also discussed: Sep 2020 (3 points, 0 comments)

It is interesting to mix EVT and GANs. Importance Splitting, a statistical tool that estimates probability of rare events and generates some of them, may also be closely related.
Great catch! Importance splitting is indeed a useful simulation technique for low probability events. The application of splitting based methods on bayesian models for extreme sample generation can be an interesting future work.
Extreme Value Theory is extensively used in anomaly detection as well. This can be a first step towards generating anomalous data which is usually quite difficult to find.
Existing GAN based approaches excel at generating realistic samples, but seek to generate typical samples, rather than extreme samples. We propose ExGAN to generate realistic and extreme samples.

ExGAN allows the user to specify both the desired extremeness measure, as well as the desired extremeness probability they wish to sample at. Generating increasingly extreme examples can be done in constant time (with respect to the extremeness probability), as opposed to the exponential time required by the baseline.

Github Repository: https://github.com/Stream-AD/ExGAN